


Prince of Ashes

by hilaryfaye



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-05 21:07:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 44,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4194930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hilaryfaye/pseuds/hilaryfaye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>One king passes, another takes his place—the sun sets, it rises again. </i>
</p><p>Imayoshi Shouichi stands ready to take his father's crown, the sole heir of a king growing old--but there are those who seek to grasp power, and Imayoshi stands in their way. Escaping a threat within his father's castle, Imayoshi enlists the protection of Harasawa, a knight living comfortably on his former reputation, and flees. Old lines of power are shifting, and Harasawa is about to learn that his prince is full of surprises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Prince

**Author's Note:**

> Animal Injury and Immolation TW toward the end of the chapter, when Imayoshi and Harasawa encounter trouble on the road.

Harasawa was told he would be accompanying the prince on a tour of the kingdom the morning of the prince's name day. He was sat in a courtyard, keeping company with his whetstone, and a bottle of whiskey. It was all the company he needed when he grew tired of gossip.  
  
Harasawa glanced up at the servant who brought the news, lowering the bottle. "The prince?"  
  
"The one and only. The king asked for you specifically."  
  
"Are you certain?"  
  
"Unless there's another Harasawa Katsunori here, which I'm assured there's not, then yes, I'm certain. The prince wants you to report to him now."  
  
Harasawa muttered a curse, sheathing the dagger he had been sharpening. "Of course."  
  
He stood, pulling on his leather vest, and his sword belt. "Finish this for me," he said, tossing the bottle of whiskey to a squire. He had a vague thought that he should get a squire, but brushed it off. A squire would only be a nuisance. He'd have enough of nuisances babysitting the prince.  
  
Harasawa ducked out of the way of servants rushing through the halls, making last minute preparations for the celebration. The prince's twentieth name day was no small occasion. Harasawa remembered when the prince had been born, how the city had celebrated then. He himself had already been knighted.  
  
The prince was in his chambers, being dressed. Some red and black ensemble, all dramatic sweeping fabric and carefully tailored lines. Harasawa kept his distance from the flurry of servants and tailors, standing where he could be seen. The prince spied him, and smiled. "Ah, Harasawa."  
  
He bowed. "Your Majesty."  
  
Prince Imayoshi Shouichi extended an arm for the harried tailor, unbothered by the activity around him. "I intend to depart on tour tomorrow morning. You'll be ready, I trust."  
  
"Of course, Your Majesty." That was damned short enough time to prepare. At least he didn't have much to pack. "How many will be in attendance?"  
  
"Just the pair of us. I don't have the patience for hangers-on." At the behest of the tailor, Imayoshi extended his other arm. "Two can travel more easily than twenty."  
  
That was true enough, but it was unusual for a prince to travel alone. There was always a party, lords and lord's sons seeking favor, knights, and wherever there was that number of men, there were also women.  
  
"When should I be prepared to depart, Your Majesty?"  
  
"Dawn," Imayoshi replied without hesitation.  
  
Harasawa blinked. The celebration of his name day would likely just be _ending_ at sunrise. He thought of asking if the prince was quite sure, but thought better of it. People of his birth did not like to be questioned. Harasawa only nodded. "I will be ready."  
  
Imayoshi turned for the tailor, so that Harasawa did not see his face, but he could hear the prince's smirk in his voice. "That is all. You may be dismissed."  
  
"Thank you, Your Majesty." He bowed, though Imayoshi could not see him. If he were anything like his father the king, he would know even without looking if the proper obeisance had not been made.  
  
Harasawa had learned to be wary of kings.

#

He packed what little he had to take--clothes, dagger, sword, whetstone, shield, cloak, and whiskey. He didn't bother with armor—only a fool wore armor when he wasn't going into battle. It was all extra weight, less mobility. As it was, it was a nuisance to put on oneself. (The only good use for a squire, he thought.)

He did not bother to go to the celebration, he could hear enough of it as he made his way to the stables. He interrupted a stablehand with a young woman who yelped when she saw Harasawa and hid her face behind her festival mask. "I can get my own horse," Harasawa muttered, looking away and walking past. He heard the pair sneaking off to a more private location.  
  
His horse seemed unremarkable, by most standards. A grey speckled stud, of average temper and look. Harasawa patted his neck, feeding him a handful of stolen grain. “Hello there, Ranger,” he murmured. The horse nudged his shoulder, looking for more grain.

Harasawa brushed him down, patting old scars on Ranger’s sides. However average he looked, Ranger had survived things Harasawa could barely believe, even having seen it. He talked to the horse as he moved around, telling him they’d be leaving soon. “I’ve seen that vile tempered beast the prince rides,” Harasawa muttered, crouching to inspect Ranger’s hooves. “If he bites you, make him regret it.” Ranger huffed into his hair.

In the quiet of the stables, Harasawa was able to think about the situation he found himself in. _The king asked for you specifically._ Fifteen years ago that might have made sense. He’d had reputation on his side then. Now all he had was his name, and people had a cursed long memory for names. 

And the prince—now there was a serpent in man’s clothes if Harasawa had ever seen one. He’d be a scourge to his enemies when he was crowned.

There was a swell of cheering from the celebration—Harasawa supposed that meant the prince had made his appearance. He left his rucksack with Ranger, knowing there was nothing in it that would interest the horse, and went to take a look at things.

He could not see the crowd on the other side of the castle walls, but he could hear them. Imayoshi was easy to pick out, even from a distance, the long red sleeves of his tunic falling back as he raised his hand to the crowd. The king was growing old. It was only a matter of time before the son took his place.

One king passes, another takes his place—the sun sets, it rises again.

Still, a sense of foreboding that Harasawa could not explain settled in his stomach. The prince smiled over his city, presented by his father. Something was not right.

#

Dawn found Harasawa saddling his horse, awake and alert only by the virtue of the paltry light filtering through the doors that prompted Ranger to nudge him until he fell over from the spot where he’d been sitting against the wall, sleeping.

“Did you sleep here?”

Harasawa looked over Ranger’s back. The horse’s ears flicked in the direction of the voice, but he didn’t look. Imayoshi leaned on the stable door, dressed in more practical—though no less red—riding gear. That red hue would make them stand out wherever they went. “Prince,” he said, tying his pack to the saddle. “I didn’t see you there.”

“So I gathered.” Imayoshi looked over his horse. “But you didn’t answer my question, did you sleep here?”

“I learned several years ago that this is the quietest place to be during a festival.” Harasawa patted Ranger. “But I am ready, as you ordered, Your Majesty.”

Imayoshi smiled.

#

Imayoshi rode a black war horse, though Harasawa knew for a fact it had never seen battle. The beast tried to take a bite out of Ranger the moment they were out of the stables together. Harasawa pulled hard on the reins, yanking Ranger out of reach. He scowled. “Your Majesty,” he said, “that beast will make traveling more difficult than it needs to be.”

Imayoshi ignored him, murmuring something to the horse. It laid its ears back, shaking its head. “Don’t mind Tyrant,” Imayoshi said, rather too cheerfully. “We’ll keep his temper in check.”

Harasawa’s grip on the reins tightened. Ranger laid his ears back, huffing.

“I’ll ride ahead,” Imayoshi said.

A better man might have told him that was unwise, but Harasawa was already annoyed at the boy, and unforgiving where his horse was concerned. If they came upon trouble in the road, he would handle it.

Imayoshi took the lead, and Harasawa followed, but not close enough to let his horse be kicked. He had seen stable hands who had handled the worst of horses flinch away from the beast Imayoshi so affectionately called “Tyrant.”

The prince seemed to be the only person in the world that horse answered to.

#

They had an escort out of the city, people thronging to see Imayoshi outside of the castle. He smiled at them, as if he saw all of them individually. They would love him for it.

Outside of the city, the royal guards who had come with them peeled away. They would return quietly, not wanting to indicate that the prince was protected by only one man. Harasawa grew uneasy as they left. A merchant might only travel with one guard, but a prince? He wished Imayoshi were wearing something less noticeable.

For a long time, they did not speak. Harasawa rode at the back, keeping an eye on the road, on the forest that loomed up around them.

The trees were tall enough he could not see the sun, but the road grew brighter, and the air warmer. Imayoshi slowed his horse, coming down beside Harasawa, though he kept Tyrant a safe distance from Ranger.

“You haven’t asked where we’re going.”

“My duty is to protect you, Your Majesty, not to ask questions.”

“You aren’t the least bit curious?”

Harasawa glanced at him. “It was told to me you were going on a tour of the kingdom. We left the city to the east, so I would believe we are headed to a lord’s house, either Susa or Momoi, where you might be properly received.”

Imayoshi smiled, though it was not the kind of smile he gave to the crowds. He looked rather too pleased. “I was beginning to think you weren’t paying attention.”

Harasawa decided it was better not to reply.

“But you would be wrong.” Imayoshi looked out along the road. “We’re bound for an inn. I’ll tell you when we’ve reached it.”

An inn. One guard, and an inn. Harasawa was beginning to suspect that Imayoshi was trying to get himself killed. “Your Majesty, I cannot advise that.”

Either Imayoshi did not hear him, or he did not care. He hummed to himself, showing no apparent sign of weariness, though Harasawa couldn’t imagine he had slept more than a few hours.

“You needn’t look that way, Harasawa,” Imayoshi said. “I assure you it’s a more comfortable inn than the stables.”

“I’m not concerned about my comfort. I consider it unsafe that the king’s only heir is travelling with but one guard, and intends to seek residence in an inn where I cannot be sure there won’t be an attempt on your person.”

“You sound almost worried about me.”

“I was under the impression that was the purpose of my presence, Your Majesty.”

“A man can be killed as easily in a lord’s house as he can in an inn.” Imayoshi sounded almost sincere. “As I said, I have no patience for hangers-on. Staying in a lord’s house will only give them an opportunity to attach themselves.”

Harasawa was about to reply, when a movement caught his notice. Ranger’s ear flicked, detecting a sound Harasawa only just made out. “Your Majesty,” Harasawa said softly, “Do not look or stop, but I believe we are being watched.” Louder, he said, “Still, if I may, Your Majesty, I can better protect you in a trusted lord’s house.”

Impressively, Imayoshi did not look or stop, but lifted his head a little to acknowledge that he had heard. “Perhaps you could. But I have not changed my mind.” He began humming to himself again, riding as if he were perfectly relaxed.

Harasawa listened, watching out of the corner of his eye. He knew there was more than one, and that they were on foot. “If I tell you to run,” he asked, “will you?”

Imayoshi only smiled. “Perhaps.”

That would have to be good enough. Six men cut out into the road, before and behind them, thinking to box them in. They wore old and battered armor, but were too well organized to be desperate. If they were robbers, they made a routine of it. Ranger laid his ears flat, snorting.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Imayoshi said, unperturbed. “Can we help you?”

Harasawa heard the snap of a bow released.

He slammed Ranger into Tyrant, the prince’s horse rearing and screaming, the arrow catching through the flesh of the leg. As Imayoshi struggled to wrestle his horse under control, Harasawa was already on the ground. Ranger, startled and angry, bucked and kicked, catching one man square in the chest. “Get down!” Harasawa shouted.

To his surprise, Imayoshi listened, keeping low over Tyrant’s back. Another arrow whisked over his head.

Three of the men converged on Harasawa. They weren’t unpracticed, clearly they had had training—but they were young, and untried.

And even new armor was imperfect.

He slammed the point of his dagger into the throat of the first, and let him fall with it buried up to the hilt, turning with his sword on the other two. They were caught off guard. One lacked vambraces, so Harasawa went after him first. A man without hands could not swing a sword.

He heard the horses screaming, and a blur of gray slammed into the third man, knocking him to the ground as hooves came up, and down again. The man without vambraces raised his sword. He couldn’t be any older than twenty five. Harasawa could have laughed—this boy had been a doddering toddler when Harasawa was already riding into battle with the king’s army.

A flash of heat billowed up behind Harasawa. He looked, startled. Imayoshi circled a man on his horse, keeping Tyrant out of the flames that now covered the men who had attacked him. Harasawa didn’t understand what he was seeing.

And that’s when the man attacked him.

Too late Harasawa leapt back, the blade cutting into his arm. The pain cut off his awareness of the fire, and Harasawa focused his attention solely on the man before him.

Perhaps realizing he’d made a mistake, the man’s eyes widened, but he did not run. Harasawa disarmed him, and cut him down.

He turned, looking for others. The smell of burning hair and flesh soaked into the air.

Ranger walked across the road and nudged him. Harasawa looked the horse over, ignoring his own wound. A few scratches, but nothing serious. He patted Ranger’s sides, murmuring what he hoped was some kind of affirmation. Then he looked to Imayoshi.

He’d dismounted, and was inspecting the arrow stuck in Tyrant’s leg. Seeing Harasawa, something almost like anger lit his face. “What do you suggest I do about this?”

“You could thank me for saving your life.”

“If you’ve killed my horse—”

“If your horse is worth anything, he’ll be fine.” Harasawa walked over, and Imayoshi stepped back to let him take a look. “It went through cleanly, only muscle. If you can keep this beast under control, I can remove it.”

Imayoshi held onto the reins as Harasawa prepared. Tyrant snorted and shifted, keeping his weight off of the injured leg. Harasawa went back to retrieve his dagger, yanking it out of the dead man’s throat. He pulled the man’s armor off and cut a length of cloth from his shirt.

Harasawa knelt, getting a good look at the arrow. He broke the shaft, tossing the arrowhead in the dirt. He cut away any splinters with his dagger, mindful of the way Tyrant shifted and snorted. Confident it wouldn’t catch or leave anything to fester, Harasawa pulled the shaft out, and ducked out of the way of Tyrant’s hooves as the horse recoiled and threw a kick.

He waited until Imayoshi had the horse under control again, and bent to tie the cloth firmly over the wound. “It’ll have to be checked,” he said, “but he’ll live.”

Imayoshi stroked the horse’s face, watching Harasawa. “You’re bleeding.”

“It happens. We should get moving, in case there were others.” Harasawa cut another strip of cloth, and fumbled with tying it over his injured arm.

Imayoshi swatted his hands away and took the cloth, wrapping it firmly. He was closer than he needed to be. “Is that tight enough?”

Harasawa nodded. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

The smirk returned, the easy tone of voice. “You can thank me later.”


	2. Red Fox Inn

If they received any attention upon their arrival at the inn, it was more for the trouble Tyrant caused in the stable than anything they did or said. The horse created enough of a problem that barely anyone commented on the blood dried to a crust on Harasawa’s clothes and face. He mumbled something vague about thieves when he was asked.

Harasawa secured a room for them, and sagged at a table in the back, keeping an eye on Imayoshi. He ached from the fight, but Imayoshi seemed completely unbothered, chatting with the other guests at the inn, passing off some story about being a merchant’s son. He’d told Harasawa to avoid honorifics until they left.

It was ridiculous how easily he drew people to him, had them mooning over him. They flitted around him like moths to a flame.

The inn keeper’s son, a slight thing with huge eyes who turned scarlet when Imayoshi looked at him, brought Harasawa a mug of beer, muttering something about ‘the good master’ paying for it. Was that what they were calling Imayoshi now?

Harasawa nursed his drink, and Imayoshi joined him at the table, leaving his throng of admirers behind, tittering and casting looks his way. “How’s your arm?”

“I’ve had worse.” Harasawa glanced at him. “If you’re thinking of taking up residence in another person’s room I would remind the good master that he would be without protection.”

Imayoshi smiled. “Let me have a look at that wound.” He reached for the binding and Harasawa leaned away.

“If I may speak frankly,” he said, “forgive me if I would rather have a proper healer.”

Imayoshi managed to look almost wounded, but the amused glimmer in his eyes gave him away. “I’m more skilled than you give me credit for. As it is, your best bet in a place like this is a witch, and any man who knowingly indebts himself to a witch is either desperate or a fool.”

He unwound the binding, inspecting Harasawa’s arm. “It will need to be cleaned—” Harasawa started to say, and then a sharp heat blossomed over his arm. Harasawa jumped, but Imayoshi held tight to his arm, palm pressed over the wound.

After a moment the pain faded, and Imayoshi released his arm. “That ought to take care of any infection.”

Harasawa looked at his arm, where a new scar had formed over the wound, as if it had been that way for months. He looked up at Imayoshi, staring at him. “That fire—that was you.”

Imayoshi leaned across Harasawa, taking the mug of beer. “Did you know that second arrow came so close I felt it go through my hair? Truly I’m very lucky to have you.”

“How did you—?”

Imayoshi looked at Harasawa, too close to him again. “Now why would I give a secret like that away?” He smiled. He smelled like smoke. “Witches are not the only ones with a few tricks.”

Harasawa felt that uneasy feeling settle in him again. “You know why they attacked us.”

“What gave you that impression?”

“How completely unsurprised you were by it.” Harasawa studied him. “And your comments about how you can be as easily killed in a lord’s house as an inn. Not telling anyone who you are.”

Imayoshi raised the beer to his lips, waiting for Harasawa to reach his eventual conclusion.

“This isn’t a tour. Someone’s trying to kill you.”

He put the mug down, still leaned halfway across the table in front of Harasawa. “Best we keep that sort of talk to ourselves.” He glanced at the rest of the room. “I’ve arranged for a bath to be sent to our room. I should like to get to it while it’s still hot.”

#

Harasawa settled on a chair with his back to the door, his head tilted up to the ceiling. He had not planned on being involved in an endeavor to hide and protect the prince from some kind of coordinated assassination attempt. And whatever brand of magic it was that Imayoshi wielded—that was more than enough of a surprise on its own.

The bath more closely resembled a repurposed barrel, just wide enough for a man to sit in. Imayoshi peeled away his clothes with no regard for Harasawa, so Harasawa looked anywhere else, taking stock of the room. Bare and plain, with a rough wood floor and a pair of narrow beds. He’d slept in much worse, but he didn’t know how Imayoshi would take to it.

“You ask remarkably few questions,” Imayoshi said.

Harasawa glanced at him on reflex and then looked away, because while he was unclothed, Imayoshi still had not gotten into the bath. “Should I be asking more? I was under the impression you kept your own secrets.”

“Are you offended I didn’t tell you that people were trying to kill me?”

“If you’re in such danger, why leave the— _your home,_ ” he said, catching himself in case the walls were listening. “Wouldn’t your father want to protect his only son?”

Imayoshi made a sound like a chuckle. “One would think.”

Harasawa shifted in his chair. Imayoshi climbed into the bath and he didn’t feel quite so intent on studying the wall to his left. “Do you mean that your father can’t protect you?”

“I’d have thought you were cleverer than that, Harasawa.” Imayoshi sat with his back to Harasawa, washing his face.

Harasawa stared at him, at the smooth planes of his back. “You don’t mean the k—your father wants you dead?”

Imayoshi was quiet.

Harasawa rocked forward in his chair. “You picked _one man_ to protect you from the k—?!”

“It was a more practical choice than you think.” Was it Harasawa’s imagination, or was there more steam than before? “I can defend myself from one man if he decides to turn on me.”

Harasawa pressed his hands to his face. “I don’t intend to hand you over to be killed, if that is what you mean.”

“All I need is to reach the mouth of the Thread. After that, I don’t care what you do.”

The Thread was a river, running from the mountains in the north down to the sea, wending its way through farmland and forests. The common folk called it the thread that stitched the world together. “What’s at the mouth of the Thread?”

“That question I won’t answer.”

Harasawa put his elbows on his knees, trying to sort everything out. That morning felt so long ago. “Why didn’t you do that—healing thing to your horse?”

“It’s not a healing so much as a cauterizing. You experienced it. Would you do that to Tyrant?”

“I pulled an arrow out of his leg and I’m not certain I should have done that.” Harasawa rubbed his face. “We shouldn’t leave until he heals, unless you’re willing to get another horse. No one will take that beast in a trade.”

“That _beast_ is mine.”

“Very well then,” Harasawa said, “how long, do you think, before someone figures out we’re here? If someone got away, heard us discussing an inn—”

“No one got away.” Imayoshi’s head lolled against the back of the bath. “I made sure of that.”

Harasawa thought of the fire. “That thing that you can do. Can your father do that?”

He only barely saw the way Imayoshi’s mouth curved in a cold smile. “You’d be astonished at the things he can do.”

#

Imayoshi insisted he bathe, and give up his clothes to be washed. Harasawa was not inclined to be disarmed and naked, and the argument ended with Imayoshi in the chair at the door, arms crossed, not nearly so considerate about where his gaze went as Harasawa had been.

The water was still as hot as if the bath had just been filled. Harasawa was loathe to admit how it soothed the ache in his shoulders. He scrubbed the blood away, and Imayoshi got up and walked around the room, taking a look.

“I hope you have something less noticeable to wear,” Harasawa said.

Imayoshi looked at him. “Hm?”

“That red marks you as someone with money, not to mention you’re visible from a mile off.”

“This is all I have.”

Harasawa cast him an incredulous look. Imayoshi looked annoyed. “Don’t you think it would have seemed suspicious if I was suddenly asking servants for their clothes?”

“I didn’t take you for an idiot.”

The room seemed suddenly much warmer than before. Imayoshi dragged the chair over from the door right up next to the bath. Harasawa shifted away. “So what do you suggest we do, Harasawa?” A flicker of a smile. “Because I might remind you that you are aiding a fugitive. The king could have you killed for that.”

Harasawa was pushed as far back against the bath as he could be without standing up brazenly. “You’re the heir to the throne. It’s my duty to protect you,” he said, “to die for you, if need be.”

“Even against the king?”

Harasawa stared levelly at him. “Even against the king.”

#

Harasawa dressed in something clean, and set himself on the move. If he languished in the inn it would drive him mad. Imayoshi agreed to stay put in the inn, and if anyone suspicious arrived, to run and wait until Harasawa found him. Harasawa paid the innkeeper, a woman who looked much like her son, but had none of his blushing shyness, to have his clothes washed and mended, and for some clean linen. He asked after something more practical for Imayoshi, and went to the stable.

Ranger nudged him, looking for treats, and patiently stood as Harasawa inspected him, making sure none of the scrapes he had received were torn open or dirty. Across the stable, in a place where he couldn’t reach any of the other horses, Tyrant watched him.

Harasawa was reluctant to approach the horse, but loathe to let a possible infection go unchecked. He found a sack of grain, scooping out a handful that he hoped would be enough to win him a little favor.

Tyrant flicked his ears and turned as Harasawa approached, as if he meant to kick him. Harasawa murmured as he walked around back to Tyrant’s head, giving the horse no excuse to be startled by him. Tyrant swung his head around, as if testing to see if Harasawa would flinch.

He did not.

“It would do everyone a favor if you would let me look at that leg,” Harasawa muttered, offering him the grain. “The prince would be an even bigger problem if I let you die of infection.”

Tyrant sniffed the grain and accepted it, and let Harasawa crouch to inspect his leg. “Lucky for you the wound was clean and high,” he said. “If it had been lower down it might have ruined you.” He took the binding and replaced it with the linen, patting the horse on the side as he rose. Tyrant snorted.

As he left the stables, Harasawa took a moment to survey the inn. Two roads intersected, the road they had come on running west back to the castle. It was only a matter of time before someone would come looking for them, would find the dead men on the road. _Should have taken the time to hide the bodies,_ Harasawa thought. He would have, if he’d known it wasn’t just criminals.

They had to leave quickly, or what little head start they had would count for nothing.

He ducked inside, meaning to ask Imayoshi if there was anyone who would know where he meant to go, if there was anyone who knew what he was looking for at the end of the Thread.

Imayoshi was not in the dining hall. Harasawa found him in their room, stretched out on one of the beds, and asleep. He didn’t stir as Harasawa closed the door, and sat the chair against it once more. Harasawa sagged, rubbing his face.

A single day and the world had been turned on its head. If he failed, if they were caught, he’d be a traitor. He’d be killed. If they succeeded, if the prince lived to take the crown, he’d be an honored hero.

Honor. Had he had honor, once? He’d had reputation. That was easy enough to come by. Ride out to war, save a handful of important lives, and you have reputation to spare.

This was something different. This wasn’t as easy as following orders.

He had already killed men for Imayoshi. Perhaps he had not known what he was protecting the prince from, but he’d done it.

And he knew, sitting there, he’d do it again. If he had nothing else, he had his sense of duty. Better to die for that, he thought, than to be a coward.

If that made him a dead man, well. Harasawa could think of worse reasons to die.


	3. Flight

The clothes that he found for Imayoshi were of the right height, but made for someone half again as broad. Imayoshi looked at the way they hung on him with distaste. “Isn’t there anything that… fits better?” He looked like a boy in his older brother’s clothes.

Harasawa looked him up and down. “No, and if there were I wouldn’t give it to you.” Imayoshi looked at him incredulously. “You’re a fugitive, _Your Majesty,”_ Harasawa hissed. “The less you look like yourself, the better.”

“So what are we to tell people? I can’t very well say you’re my guard if I look like a pauper.”

Harasawa smiled. “Tell them you’re my squire.”

#

They ate, and planned where they would go next, how they would avoid any royal soldiers, and bought food to take with them. Imayoshi admitted to no ignorance, but he avoided making too many suggestions.

The innkeeper returned Harasawa’s washed and mended clothes. For lack of anything else to do, Harasawa spent a good part of the day in the stable, while Imayoshi continued to charm the other residents of the inn. He packed their things, not willing to stay another night so close to the castle.

Tyrant seemed to be doing well, keeping off his wounded leg. He wouldn’t be fit for riding, yet. He only tried to bite Harasawa once.

He was out in the stables when he heard the troupe approaching. He’d have known the sound of a royal troupe anywhere—the clank of armor, the way they talked.

Harasawa had never saddled a horse faster. He led Ranger and Tyrant behind the inn, and ducked inside, shoving the innkeeper’s son out of the way as he found Imayoshi entertaining a pretty young woman with some story. “We have to go,” he said.

Imayoshi looked up, and nodded. He apologized to the girl, and followed Harasawa out. “What is it?”

“Soldiers. They’ll be coming to ask if anyone’s seen us, I’m sure. Tyrant isn’t fit to ride, I’ve tied his reins to Ranger’s saddle. Take Ranger and go to that village I told you about—take the north road, first, then cut back on a trail and down the stream until it brings you south.”

“What about you?”

There was an uproar in the inn.

Harasawa shoved Imayoshi toward the horses. “I’ll catch up.” 

Imayoshi took to the saddle as a group of soldiers burst from the inn, and spotted them. “Halt!”

Imayoshi took off, bent low over Ranger’s back so he would make a smaller target. Harasawa drew his sword.

One of the men knew him. “Harasawa,” he said, “you and the prince must return to the castle immediately.” Curious, how everyone seemed to be forgetting that there should be a “sir” in front of his name.

“I’d like to ask what right you have to hunt us down like common criminals.” Each of them was armored, each of them was experienced, each of them younger than he. All he had to do was buy Imayoshi some time.

Simple enough, except that he wasn’t willing to die at the hands of a single one of them. He had fought and defeated better men.

“You are charged with abducting the prince, conspiring against the king, and the murder of seven of the king’s men.”

Abducting the prince. Well, that was something new.

“If you want the prince,” Harasawa said, “then you’ll have to find him first, won’t you?”  

#

He followed the road under the cover of night. He couldn’t risk a light, and as it was he had nothing with which to carry a flame. He thought he had shaken off the last of the soldiers, and looped back through a trail and down a stream they wouldn’t know to follow, fumbling his way through the failing light. He thought he had led them far enough astray. They would head north, while he went south.

Harasawa stopped, tightening the tourniquet he had tied over his thigh. His limp slowed him, but he had stopped bleeding before he turned back, so they wouldn’t be able to track him by that, at least.  His clothes were still damp from the stream, and as night came on and the warmth left the day, they turned icy cold.

The bastard who had charged him with his list of crimes had managed to cut him, and that offended Harasawa more than the charge.

The trees ended upon a field, wheat whispering with the faint breeze as Harasawa trudged past it, listening for any sound. All he heard was the wheat, thick with singing crickets, the frogs of some distant pond calling back to them, and his own feet.

The farmer’s home had a lantern hanging out before the door. Harasawa thought to go up to it and knock, to beg for a place to sleep because he couldn’t make it to the village, when the door opened. He could not see Imayoshi’s face but he knew well enough that it was him. He had a particular posture, one could never mistake him for a farm boy. “So, you made it out alive.”

Harasawa stood on the road, almost relieved to see Imayoshi. “So I did.”

“Come inside, then.” Imayoshi waited for him to make it to the door before stepping back, giving Harasawa just enough room to limp inside. “You look like hell.”

Harasawa cast him a glance. “You’re welcome.”

The family was mostly asleep, save the farmer, who added wood to the fire and looked at Harasawa as he came inside. “You’ll need a healer for that,” he said, nodding at Harasawa’s leg.

“Is there one nearby?”

“Just a short walk, though she’ll be none too pleased if I wake her this time of night.”

Harasawa opened his mouth to say he could wait till morning, but his leg quivered, and gave. He caught himself on the table, dropping into a chair. Exhaustion forced him to stay put. “I’m… it can’t wait.”

The farmer nodded, reaching up to retrieve a lantern. He woke his eldest son, a boy of about twelve, whispering to him. Harasawa leaned into the table, struggling to keep his eyes open. Imayoshi sat next to him. “What happened at the inn?”

“Did you know I kidnapped you?” Harasawa asked. “And single-handedly killed seven men in doing it.”

Imayoshi smiled. “Did you now?”

“They tell me that’s what I did.” Harasawa shifted, moving his already stiffening legs to a more comfortable position. “I killed one of them, which won’t earn me any favors, but I was able to shake off the rest of them.”

“That brings your body count in my abduction up to eight.”

The farmer returned to tend the fire, glancing at them every now and then. Imayoshi lowered his voice. “He doesn’t trust us.”

“He has no reason to.” Harasawa’s hand curled into a fist, and he grimaced. Now that he had stopped moving there was little to distract him from his injuries. “He remembers the war.” He could feel Imayoshi look at him but he was in no mood to elaborate. “I thought I told you to go into the village.”

“I wasn’t sure whether or not you meant to give me up.”

Harasawa rubbed his face. “Your lack of trust is not going to help either of us get through this alive.”

“How did you know this place was even here?”

Harasawa wished Imayoshi would stop asking questions. “How close is the healer?” he asked the farmer.

“Close enough,” the farmer replied. “And in no hurry, I’d guess.”

Harasawa nodded, and looked at Imayoshi. “In my pack… whiskey.”

Imayoshi rose, going to fetch the bottle. Harasawa turned to the farmer. “Thank you.”

The farmer glanced at him. “You can thank me by leaving in the morning. Your _squire_ tells me you’re being chased, and I’ve no mind to bring trouble.” His voice said he didn’t believe for a moment that Imayoshi was anyone’s squire, perhaps he even doubted that Harasawa was a knight.

Harasawa couldn’t blame him for that. He’d doubt it, too.

“We’ll be gone,” Harasawa promised him. “We won’t stay more than a night.” He wouldn’t stay at all, if he thought he’d be able to stand again that night. “The horses…”

“Behind the house. That monster your squire rides—did you find that one in hell?”

Harasawa coughed a laugh. “Sometimes I think he must have.”

Imayoshi returned with the bottle of whiskey, and nodded at the door. “The boy’s coming back.”

Harasawa knocked back a swallow of whiskey.

“You’ve ruined your clothes again,” Imayoshi commented. Harasawa gave him a caustic look.

The door opened, and the boy came through with a woman about Harasawa’s age, carrying a basket covered with a cloth. She looked directly over him to Imayoshi, the lines around her eyes tightening. “Odd, that one of your kind should come here.”

Imayoshi sat back, squaring his shoulders. “I didn’t come for you.”

“Indeed not. One of your kind would never ask my help.” She looked to Harasawa , taking his measure. “Men like you would do well to be wary of people who start fires.”

The fire in the hearth flared as if a barrel of lamp oil had been spilled into it. The farmer leapt back from the hearth, knocking into the table, slamming it into Harasawa’s side.

Harasawa ground his teeth together, and gestured his leg. “Could we do something about this, maybe? Instead of swapping riddles.” He almost missed the pleased look in Imayoshi’s eye.

“We haven’t discussed the subject of payment.”

Imayoshi muttered something about witches and rose from the table. “I can pay you,” he said, offering her a smile.

The healer’s face did not soften. “So you can. Shall we discuss outside?”

Harasawa turned his attention to his bottle of whiskey as they left. He had half a mind to ask the woman what “Imayoshi’s kind” was, but he resented the thought of admitting that he did not know. There seemed to be an awful damn lot he didn’t know, these days.

They returned a short while later, Imayoshi rubbing a tender spot on his shoulder, as if he had been punched. The healer put a small bundle wrapped in wool into her bag, and turned her attention to Harasawa’s wound. She took the chair Imayoshi had vacated, setting the lantern on the table for better light. “You would have been better off if this were from a sharper blade, sir,” she said. “The cut would be cleaner.”

She turned to her basket, retrieving a series of small, dark vials, rags, and delicate surgeon’s tools that must have been quite costly to come by. “I need hot water,” she said to no one in particular.

Harasawa looked to Imayoshi, who ducked out the door in the direction of the well. He brought a full bucket, splashing it into a pot that he hung over the fire. The farmer watched the goings on with disinterest, keeping the most suspicious eye on Imayoshi.

Harasawa kept drinking as the healer worked. He’d learned it was the best way to sit through something like that.

She cleaned the wound, and applied some mix from her bottles that burned so badly Harasawa bit his tongue until it bled. She bound the leg with a salve that dulled the pain to an ache, and released the tourniquet on his leg. “I would advise for you to rest, though I know circumstances do not always permit it.” She pressed a vial into his hand. “Take this in the morning, before you break fast. That will make up at least in part for the rest you cannot take.”

She collected her things, and Imayoshi opened his eyes, watching in silence as she left. The farmer rose and gestured. “I’ve made a place for you to sleep in the barn.”

Harasawa managed to get to his feet, limping after him and carrying his bottle of whiskey. He felt he had probably had too much, circumstances considered, but he could stomach more than most. Imayoshi followed, shoulders slumped and humming to himself as if it were some kind of countryside jaunt. Harasawa thanked the farmer again, who gave him a tired look, and reminded them to be gone in the morning.

“What did you pay her?” Harasawa asked. “We have to keep a tight purse if we—”

“She didn’t want money.” Imayoshi looked around the barn. It was little more than a shed, just a place to store grain and shelter a milk cow. Imayoshi settled down on one of the blankets laid over the hay. “Let me see the binding.”

Harasawa thought the healer had done a perfectly fine job of things, but he sat, pulling back the torn fabric. Imayoshi leaned over, inspecting her work.

“You came through here in the war, didn’t you?” Imayoshi’s fingers traced feather-light over the new binding. “That’s how you knew it was here.”

“The king’s men often camped here,” Harasawa said, trying to keep up the energy just to sit up. “Villages aren’t made to support armies… and soldiers don’t keep enough to themselves.” Harasawa gave up, and laid back. Imayoshi went over the binding for a moment more, and pulled away.

Harasawa put a hand over his eyes. “I can’t believe you really told someone you were my squire.”

“He didn’t believe me.”

“No, I know he didn’t. It doesn’t matter, he doesn’t even want to know our names.” Harasawa closed his eyes. “God. I want another drink.”

He heard Imayoshi get up. He felt Imayoshi’s weight settle next to him. “Why don’t you wear armor?” His voice was dangerously pleasant.

Harasawa’s voice felt like grit in his throat. “Because it’s bulky, it slows me down.”

“You don’t seem to be fast enough to evade injury without it.”

Harasawa’s face settled into what he hoped was an annoyed look. “With all due respect, Your Majesty, you’ve never seen me face a single opponent. Three or more men are hard to keep track of.”

“Can you only defeat one at a time?”

Harasawa opened his eyes, turning his head to look at Imayoshi. “I never said that. I only said it was easier to leave the fight unscathed.” If heat had a smell, that was what Imayoshi smelled like, like baked earth and still air, like wildfire weather.

Imayoshi leaned in, though there wasn’t much room for him to do so. “I have an injured horse and an injured knight. Not much in my favor.”

“Perhaps. I have an unharmed horse and an unharmed prince, so the score seems even to me.” Perhaps it was whiskey, perhaps it was how damned much he hurt or how tired he was, but it didn’t seem odd to him that Imayoshi was so close, stretched alongside him on the narrow blanket.

“Call me ‘Your Majesty,’ again.” Imayoshi’s hand settled on the front of his shirt.

“Your Majesty…” He murmured it, and Imayoshi kissed him.

For a moment, it seemed as natural as the draft stirring the air. Imayoshi shifted up onto his elbow so he could lean over Harasawa, fingers moving up into his hair, cradling his head. His teeth tested the line of Harasawa’s bottom lip.

It was the thunderclap of clarity that woke Harasawa from whatever stupor the whiskey had put him in, and he jerked back, harder than he meant to, staring at Imayoshi, unable to say anything.

Imayoshi looked at him a moment, and shifted back to the other blanket as if nothing had happened.

Harasawa stared at his back, not sure what to say, what to make of what had just happened.

Imayoshi did not look at him, or give any sign of acknowledgment. Harasawa settled again on the blanket, staring through the dark barn, wondering how in the hell he was going to get to sleep.

 


	4. The Empty Hall

He did sleep, or he must have, because he woke to the sound of the barn door creaking shut, someone running from the door before they were seen. Imayoshi still slept, an arm thrown across his eyes. Harasawa climbed to his feet, investigating a pair of small packs that had been left for them. Each had sausages, a boiled egg, some bread and cheese, and a pair of small, still rather green apples.  He closed the packs, and fumbled through his things for the vial the healer had left.

Whatever was inside taste like bile, and it was his coughing and spluttering trying to keep it down that woke Imayoshi. Imayoshi stretched and sat, watching him with an amused smile.

“We should get the horses ready,” Harasawa said, trying to hold back another cough.

Imayoshi nodded. “What’s that?” he asked, nodding at the packs.

“Breakfast. We’ll eat when we leave.” Harasawa took a swallow of whiskey, just to get the taste of whatever mix he’d just had out of his mouth.

Chickens squawked and ran underfoot when they stepped out, released from their shed. One of the farmer’s children had been feeding them, and hid behind the chicken house when she spotted them.

“You’d think we were ghosts,” Imayoshi said.

“They’d prefer ghosts.”

The sun could not have been more than an hour above the horizon, but the air already promised a still, hot day. Harasawa fed the apples to Ranger. “You seem to be in good shape,” he said. “Good work, yesterday.”

Ranger nudged his shoulder, snuffling at his shirt.

Harasawa crouched to collect his saddle, and paused. He stood, pressing weight on his injured leg.

It didn’t hurt. “That healer,” he said to Imayoshi. “Was she a witch?”

“I told you, that’s the only thing you get in a place like this.” Imayoshi glanced at him. “She gives you a mysterious vial to drink and you don’t put it together that she’s a witch until you drink it?”

Harasawa ignored him. He was looking at Tyrant. “Your horse.” Tyrant’s leg was no longer bound, and he no longer kept his weight off it.

“If I’m paying for some country witch to heal my knight I may as well have her heal my horse.” Imayoshi looked at him from over the saddle, smiling. “You know she claimed the same price for you as she did for Tyrant.”

Harasawa pondered the possibility of clubbing Imayoshi over the head with a bucket. “What exactly did she want?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Not your firstborn, I hope.”

Imayoshi chuckled. “Nothing quite so long-term.” He pulled himself into the saddle. Even in borrowed clothes, he sat like a prince. He simply didn’t know any other way to be. “Our host tells me it’s just a mile or so to the river, and that it joins with the Thread.”

“So it does,” Harasawa agreed. “I would not call it the fastest way to the Thread… but it is less travelled. We’ll be less likely to encounter anyone who knows our faces.”

There was no breeze to stir the wheat as they left, past the fields and into the low hills until they reached the riverbank. Stones as tall as a man thrust up from the water, worn smooth around their bases by the constant crush of the water coming down, running white as clouds between the rocks. Harasawa scanned the trees. They wouldn’t be able to hear anyone following them.

He would have to watch that much closer.

He could have said the day passed almost tranquilly. The spray off the river, and the shade of the trees, kept the heat at bay. They paused every now and then to rest, to eat. They spoke little—it would have been hard to hear each other over the roar, anyway.

Near midday they came upon a slower, placid section of the river, where the land flattened out and opened upon a field where sheep were grazing. A stripling of a child, no older than nine or so, watched them suspiciously from the flock, armed with only a staff and a sling.

Harasawa might almost have called it peaceful, were he not seeing it as it had been over fifteen years before. He saw, there, the place that the king’s army had marched through, there, valley in which they had camped. He thought, every now and then, he saw a dead man’s face in the water.

“Harasawa?”

Imayoshi’s voice shook him from the memory. He looked away from the river, where they had stopped to drink. “Your Majesty.”

Imayoshi searched his face. “Are you alright?”

The simplicity of the question might have surprised him. “It’s nothing, Your Majesty.”

“Is it?” Imayoshi was crouched next to him on the rocks. “You look like you’ve seen your own death.”

Harasawa shook his head. “We were ambushed here,” he said. “It was—the last three months of the war. Men are worst when they’re desperate.” Harasawa almost laughed. “This is where the king’s horse took an arrow and went down. I was the one who pulled him out of the river. Almost drowned, doing it. Of course I was given quite the celebration for it.” Harasawa stood, rubbing his face. “Wonder now if I should have bothered.”

Imayoshi watched the river, where the water had turned murky green.

“Let’s go.” Harasawa didn’t think he could look at that stretch of the river a moment longer.

“Harasawa.” Imayoshi wasn’t looking at him. “If my father had died in the war, a regent would have been appointed. Not my mother, of course, no one trusted her. A cousin of my father’s, I suppose. And they would have tried to kill me, rather than let me take the throne. So, really, we would have ended up here all the same. Or, I suppose, I might have been smothered in my bed.”

Harasawa looked to the sky. “I would never have had the pleasure of having you comparing me to your horse.”

“When have I done that?”

“We should get moving,” Harasawa said. “The more ground we cover before anyone guesses we’ve gone south, the better.”

#

Dusk brought them to a meadow, thick with wildflowers. Harasawa stopped Ranger, looking out over the low, rolling hill. He knew this place.

“Unless there’s a village just past those trees,” Imayoshi said, “shouldn’t we camp here?”

Harasawa didn’t answer him. He spurred Ranger forward, trotting up the hill. Imayoshi followed.

They crested the hill, and Harasawa stopped again, knuckles white around the reins. Imayoshi came up beside him, and stared. “This is—”

“It was, Your Majesty,” Harasawa said. “It was the hall of the Hyuuga family.”

Even from that distance in the low light, Harasawa could see how the place had fallen into disrepair. “The last time I saw it, it was in flames.” He turned Ranger back down the hill. “We’ll camp by the riverside.”

Harasawa busied himself collecting wood, carving out a shallow basin for the fire. He looked away for a moment to fetch his flint, and came back to a fire already crackling, Imayoshi sitting in its glow.

“I’ll never figure out how you do that,” Harasawa muttered.

Imayoshi smiled. “Don’t be so sure.” The fire painted his face almost red, and Harasawa had to look away.

His eyes travelled up the hill. Imayoshi followed his gaze. “I had heard there were still empty halls like that left over from the war. I didn’t realize this one was so close.”

“They weren’t a significant family,” Harasawa said. “Just a small estate. That’s probably why they took up with the Traitor. Thought they had something to gain by it.”

“Sit down, Harasawa, you look like you’re about to fall over.” Harasawa sat, warming his hands by the fire, though he wasn’t really cold. Imayoshi was watching him. “I can’t tell if this place means something particular to you, or if you’re this troubled by the whole war.”

Harasawa glanced at him. “I was barely older than you, Your Majesty, when the Traitor’s rebellion began. And as for this place…” Harasawa had to force himself not to look over his shoulder at the hill. “I should have died here.”

The fire seemed to almost go out, before the flames leapt up again. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that in trying to save the life of the man I was squire for, one of the Traitor’s men put an axe in my back.” Harasawa stared at the fire. “I remember lying on the ground… I could taste dirt, and blood, and smoke. And I remember the castle was on fire.” He became aware that he was tugging on his own hair, a nervous habit from childhood he’d never seemed to outgrow.

“I woke up… weeks later in an infirmary. By all accounts there’s no reason I should have survived, the healers told me they never expected me to make it through the night, but then every morning I was still breathing.” Harasawa listened to the river, the crackle of the fire. “I was in no fit shape to walk, let alone ride or fight. Before I knew it the Traitor was dead, and I had missed victory.” He gave a bitter smile. “Strange, that that’s the thing that still stings. I wasn’t there the day the Traitor died. So, naturally, everyone soon forgot about me.

“Or not quite, I suppose. They remembered I pulled the king out of this river. So they wanted to know why I hadn’t been there at the last battle.” Harasawa looked at Imayoshi. “You know what it looks like, when your back is wounded? It looks like you tried to run.”

“You didn’t, though.”

“No. I only turned my back at the wrong moment.”

“Is that why no one calls you ‘sir’?”

Harasawa looked at him sourly. “I would kindly remind His Majesty that he does not call me ‘sir,’ either.”

Imayoshi smirked. “Nor do I care to, if I’m being honest. _‘Sir’_ Harasawa I don’t think I could say it with a straight face.”

Harasawa ignored the jab. “I suppose that must be it. And the fact that there’s been no great war since for me to earn it back. It seemed to matter less, when all there was for me to do was play at being castle guard.” He was pulling on his hair again. He clasped his hands together. “Now, of course, I’ve been branded a criminal.”

“Only so long as my father sits on the throne.” Imayoshi stretched. “Once I take his place you won’t have that problem.”

“You have to outlive him, first, Your Majesty.” Harasawa was glad of the change of subject. “Do you have a plan for that, or are we to keep running over the countryside until either you or the king dies?”

“I told you I don’t care what you do after you get me to the mouth of the Thread.”

“That factors into your grand plan, somehow?”

“It does.” Imayoshi pulled off the tunic he was wearing, shaking it out. “I hate this thing. I’ve never worn something that itched so badly.”

“It may well be infested with fleas,” Harasawa commented.

“I’d have noticed. It’s the wool, it’s about to drive me mad.” Imayoshi stood, bare chested. He tossed the tunic over his saddle, pacing. Harasawa looked away, though he couldn’t say why. “Get me where I need to go and you can do whatever you like.”

Harasawa crushed his hands together. “With all due respect, Your Majesty, I don’t intend to miss victory again.”

Imayoshi turned, and Harasawa looked up. The way he stood, the firelight made him look something close to menacing, something more dangerous than a twenty year old prince, even—especially—when he smiled. “Is that so? I’m glad to hear it.”

Harasawa’s mouth was dry. He stood, going to the river. He splashed his face with cold water and leaned over the rocks. Imayoshi’s footsteps crunched down beside him, and Harasawa stared across the river, through the dark underbrush as if he meant to catch sight of something there.

“Are you afraid of me, Harasawa?”

Harasawa laughed, though it sounded more like choking. “Why should I be? You start fires like it’s easy as breathing and I have no idea what to make of you.” Harasawa stood, if only because that little bit of difference in their height made him feel somehow less vulnerable. “And I suppose there’s the fact that if this works, you’ll be king sooner than later and I don’t know if you’ll be a good one, or if this will be another ‘honor’ I wonder if I should have bothered with—”

“Harasawa.” Imayoshi’s hand closed over the back of his neck, and Harasawa wished it didn’t fit so well. Imayoshi pulled him down, turning his face up to kiss him, soft and all the more dangerous for it. “You talk too much.”

It took Harasawa a moment to find his voice again. “Which is it, Your Majesty? Do I ask too few questions or do I talk too much?”

“Right now it’s the latter, but I’m apt to change my mind.” Imayoshi’s hand slipped down to his shoulder. “There’s so little to entertain myself with out here,” he said, stroking Harasawa’s throat with his thumb, finding the place where his pulse beat like a hammer. “I’m afraid you’re all I have.”

Harasawa’s world had shrunk to that hand on his throat, to Imayoshi’s smiling face. “I live to serve, Your Majesty.”

Imayoshi leaned into Harasawa, his mouth against Harasawa’s throat. “I should like to see that scar,” he murmured, his hand pressing into the small of Harasawa’s back. Harasawa could swear he felt that voice go down the length of his spine, radiating out under Imayoshi’s palm like the rays of the sun. “And all the others.”

Harasawa barely remembered getting back to their bedrolls, flat on his back and half in the grass, with Imayoshi straddling his hips. He didn’t want to admit how hungry he was for this, tracing the lines of Imayoshi’s chest, exploring by feel because Imayoshi barely let him up for air, let alone to look at him.

“Your Majesty,” Harasawa gasped, when Imayoshi moved his attentions to his throat, “if you mean to undress me it would be faster if you let me sit up.”

Imayoshi replied by sinking his teeth into Harasawa’s neck, but he sat back on Harasawa’s thighs, pushing his vest off of him as he sat up. Harasawa began to pull his tunic off, though Imayoshi was glad to help it the rest of the way, and push him back down, tracing hands and mouth over every scar and bruise he found. His hair fell over his eyes, and—heaven help him—he was terrifying and beautiful.

Harasawa’s gaze drifted to the fire behind them. Unbidden, the thought that he was being played rose to the front of his mind. For all he knew, Imayoshi could be lying to him. Perhaps there was no plot to kill him, only a young man reaching for the throne, and Harasawa was a tool in some larger plan.

It would be easy for Imayoshi to see that he was a man who could be toyed with. Insignificant, seeking to gain something by becoming a traitor.

All of this, he thought, could be leading to Imayoshi throwing his pawn away. Men like him would do well to be wary of people who start fires

Imayoshi paused, looking at him. “You’re brooding.”

Harasawa did not want to discuss this with him now. He sat up, pressing his lips to Imayoshi’s. “You wanted to see that scar, Your Majesty?”

Imayoshi climbed off of him, and Harasawa turned. He had seen what it looked like, once or twice, when he chanced upon a mirror. As wide as three of his fingers, from the middle of his back on the right, down to his left hip. The reason he ached so badly when the weather grew cold, the reason he bathed where no one would see him, the reason he hadn’t let someone get this close to him in he couldn’t remember how long.

Imayoshi pressed his fingers to the scar’s highest point. Harasawa shivered, crushing his tunic in his fist, his shoulders drawn as tight as a hide on a tanning frame.

Imayoshi bent, pressing a line of kisses down the length of the scar, his hand on Harasawa’s shoulder. Harasawa shuddered, the knot in his shoulders unwinding.

If Imayoshi was playing him, if he was only a pawn—he wasn’t sure he cared.

Imayoshi slid up along his back, his arms coming around Harasawa’s chest. “I feel almost ill-prepared,” he murmured, nuzzling Harasawa’s throat. “I have no scars to show you.”

Harasawa pulled him off, and turned, looking at Imayoshi. “As long as I am here, Your Majesty, I’d like to keep it that way.” He touched his fingers to the base of Imayoshi’s throat. “I won’t let anyone lay a hand on you.”

“Present company excluded, I hope.”

Harasawa smiled. “If that is His Majesty’s wish.”

Imayoshi pushed Harasawa back again. “It is.” His hands moved to the front of Harasawa’s trousers. “And it is my wish, Sir, that you let me comfort you after you have received so many injuries for my sake.”

Harasawa thought that then was not the appropriate time to remark that ‘two’ hardly counted as ‘so many.’ “You’re right, you shouldn’t call me sir. It sounds sly coming from you.”

Imayoshi smiled, easing Harasawa’s pants down to his hips. “I suspect you would think everything sounds sly, coming from me.”

“Would you deny it?”

“I suppose not.” He bent low, running his tongue over a scar on Harasawa’s hip. Harasawa sucked in a breath.

“I—wait, Your Majesty.”

Imayoshi glanced up. “What is it?”

“Are you sure—do you want to do this— _here.”_

“Here as in our camp or here as in this place?”

“Either. Both.”

“Is it me you’re worried about, or yourself?” Imayoshi leaned up on his hands, brushing his lips over Harasawa’s. “Because I don’t need a feather bed to fuck you, _sir.”_

Harasawa felt very much that he couldn’t breathe, and he didn’t much mind. He became aware that Imayoshi was waiting for him to say something, or do something.

A better man would have insisted he needed to keep watch. A better man would have said something about how he should be protecting the prince, not staring at the sweep of his lips.

Harasawa was not a better man.

He cupped a hand around the back of Imayoshi’s neck, stroking his fingers over Imayoshi’s hair. “I’m worried,” he said at last, “about how readily I’ll walk through hell for you, Your Majesty.”

Imayoshi smiled. “Well I hope you don’t do that too soon, I’d like to enjoy your company for a bit, first.” He eased his way down Harasawa’s torso, drawing a line with his mouth. An army could have been marching down on them and Harasawa would not have noticed.

He finished almost embarrassingly fast, though Imayoshi didn’t seem to mind, returning his attention to Harasawa’s scars, as if he meant to devour Harasawa. Harasawa ran his hand down Imayoshi’s side, stopping to cup just behind his thigh, pulling Imayoshi closer to him, kissing him. Imayoshi had both hands in his hair, hips pressed against Harasawa’s stomach.

Harasawa could have spent all night just touching him, tracing the lines of him. This was his prince, this was the man who would someday be king, this was—“Your Majesty,” Harasawa breathed, sliding his hands down to Imayoshi’s hips. They shifted, easing Imayoshi onto the blanket. Harasawa loosened the tie in Imayoshi’s trousers, sliding his hand under. “Your Majesty.”

Imayoshi was so damnably silent, but his breath caught, just the slightest bit. Harasawa stroked his cock, leaning over Imayoshi, marveling at him. He had to taste him, had to know, had to have this just once because he didn’t know if he would ever have it again. So he bent, and the ragged gasp that escaped Imayoshi’s throat was all the answer he needed.

When he came it was with a sigh into the back of his hand. Imayoshi’s whole body went slack, as if released from something.

Harasawa laid next to him, his hand traveling over hip, into the shallow valley of his waist, higher again onto his ribs, shifting as Imayoshi breathed.

Imayoshi traced his fingers through Harasawa’s hair. “Say it again.”

Harasawa pulled him up, pressing his mouth to Imayoshi’s. His voice was raw. “Your Majesty.”


	5. A Familiar Face

Imayoshi slept with his back against Harasawa’s. The night air was cool, but Harasawa barely noticed, as Imayoshi alone produced enough heat to keep him perfectly drowsy. He was aware that he should probably be staying up to keep watch, but at the moment he nearly got up to do so, Imayoshi rolled over, curling around his back, and Harasawa stayed put, focused on the soft brush of Imayoshi’s breath on his shoulder.

_This is going to be it,_ he thought, a little amused, _this will be what kills me. Not keeping watch because the prince is in my bed._

The night passed without incident, breaking on a fast-warming morning. They packed up their camp, saying little, and left. Harasawa was glad to be leaving the place.

For six days they traveled along the river, camping along the shore.

It seemed to Harasawa as if Imayoshi was endeavoring to map the scars on his body. His hand always seemed to find that place on Harasawa’s back, tracing the line of that scar. He could find that scar through Harasawa’s shirt, under his vest. Just a touch, just a reminder.

On the seventh day, near noon, they came upon a village. A squat wood bridge stretched across the river, wide enough for two carts to pass abreast with room between them. Harasawa knew that bridge, and he knew that across it rested an inn where they could room, and no one would ask questions of just another knight and his squire come through on some business.

“Can you get Tyrant across the bridge without him causing a riot?” Harasawa asked.

“He’s not wild.”

“Are you certain?”

“He’ll be under control.”

Harasawa shrugged, and they started down toward the bridge. “By the by,” Harasawa commented, “you do understand that if anyone’s to believe you’re my squire, you have to act like it?”

Imayoshi glanced at him. “Oh?”

“I’m entrusting you with making sure our horses are properly stabled. Don’t make me choose my horse over you.”

Imayoshi smiled. “Of course, sir.”

“One other thing.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Stop calling me that like you’re indulging me.” Harasawa let out a breath, turning back to the village. The likelihood that anyone would recognize him was slim, or so he hoped. He hadn’t been there in over fifteen years, surely that was long enough to blur the memory of his face. Age would be on his side. If he didn’t give his name…

The Merry Miller tavern was used to housing wandering knights, particularly those who—Harasawa could tell from the gaze he suffered—looked rather suspiciously like they might actually be wandering brigands. As long as he kept to himself, the attitude was, there’d be no trouble.

“Just the night?”

“Just the night.”

“Hmm.” Another innkeeper might have asked where they were bound. This one found it was bad business to ask those kinds of questions. “The one at the end of the hall, on the right.”

Harasawa nodded, and went out to check on the horses.

Imayoshi seemed to have stabled them without incident, though there were foul looks cast his way by the stablehands. “Ah, sir,” Imayoshi smiled. “I’m afraid Tyrant tried to take a bite out of someone.”

So not completely without incident.

“Brush them down and make sure they’re fed,” Harasawa said, and in a lower voice, he added, “and stay out of trouble.”

“Of course, sir.”

Harasawa mistrusted that smirk.

He meant to take a walk, to stretch his legs before he kept to the inn for the rest of the evening. He suspected it was a risk, but he thought it best to scout the place a bit.

And perhaps, he was hoping to see something he recognized.

The forge was where he remembered it, though it seemed the blacksmith had been replaced by his son. The tannery was still, mercifully, on the other side of the village, and the mill just down the river. Harasawa stood on the bridge to look at it all, letting out a breath.

He became aware that someone was watching him.

Harasawa turned, and the world plummeted out from underneath him.

Because looking at him, still as recognizable to him as she’d been fifteen years ago, was the woman he’d once called his wife.

“So,” she said, “it is you. I thought I might be imagining things.” She had a basket on her hip, apparently out selling honey. When last he’d seen her she’d known the location of maybe a dozen hives, and never once had she been stung.

“Chiyo.” Harasawa stared at her.

“You needn’t look like you’ve seen a ghost, Katsunori, you’re the one everyone thinks is dead.” She shifted her basket, brushing a strand of hair out of her face. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s just a stop. I’ll be gone in the morning.”

Chiyo gave him a look that said that wasn’t the question she asked. “I saw you come into the village. I’m surprised you have a squire.”

“So am I.” Harasawa couldn’t quite look her in the eye. “How are you?”

“I’m well. So are Souta and Yuki, not that you asked.”

Harasawa flinched. “They can’t possibly remember me.”

“Not well, but I thought you might remember them.” She looked down the river. “I remarried shortly after you left.”

He’d expected that. “I’m happy for you.”

Chiyo shifted, and looked at him, lowering her voice. “A few days ago royal soldiers came through. They were looking for a knight with a scar on his back, accused of murdering six men and kidnapping the prince.”

“Only six?”

“Katsunori.”

“I must have been an awful husband, if you’re so willing to accept that they’re looking for me.” Harasawa put his arms on the rail of the bridge.

“Are they looking for you?”

Harasawa didn’t answer.

“Katsunori, what did you _do?”_

“Well I can tell you I didn’t abduct the prince,” Harasawa said. “Not sure how I would have managed that even if I’d wanted to. As for the rest—I’d love to tell you, Chiyo, but honestly I’m not sure what you’d do with the whole story.” He shouldn’t have come here. He should have insisted they go on, camp elsewhere.

She made a curt sound that meant she was annoyed with him. “Well, I won’t advise you to stay long.”

“I promise you I won’t.”

She left him standing on the bridge, without so much as a goodbye, and he supposed he deserved that. He hadn’t given her much more when he left.

Harasawa let out a breath, stepping back. He made his way back to the tavern, keeping a careful eye out for anyone who might recognize his face. The village had grown, and no one else who he knew, or who seemed to know him, caught his eye.

Imayoshi, it seemed had been busy while he was gone. Horses stabled and fed and groomed, a second blanket for the bed—as there was only the one—and a copper bath which he was busy filling, running buckets of water from the well. If the innkeeper thought it odd that Imayoshi didn’t bother to heat the water over the fire, she didn’t ask. She did make a remark to Harasawa that she thought his squire was rather mouthy.

“You look like you’ve just watched a tragedy,” Imayoshi commented, tossing his shirt across the bed.

Harasawa shrugged his shoulders, sitting on the edge of the bed—there was no chair—and leaning back against the wall.

Imayoshi stripped and climbed into the bath, setting about scrubbing the days of travel off of him. He had washed once or twice in the river, or tried to, and found it colder than he cared for.

The water steamed and even hissed, and Harasawa wondered how it was that he didn’t even find that remarkable anymore.

“Harasawa, come over here.” Imayoshi folded his arms across the side of the bath, smiling at him. He never looked flushed, Harasawa thought.

Harasawa dragged himself off the bed, and leaned over the tub, resting his hands on either side of it. “Yes, Your Majesty?” He said the words soft, he didn’t want to be overheard.

Imayoshi pressed fingers under his chin, lifting Harasawa’s face just so, the better to kiss him. Harasawa leaned into it for a moment, and remembered the conversation with his wife. He pulled back. “There were royal soldiers looking for us here a few days ago. They may yet come back, or we may run into them on the road.”

“That would be unpleasant,” Imayoshi said. “How did you find out about this?”

“It doesn’t matter. We need to have a plan.”

“You avoided that question rather swiftly, Harasawa.” Imayoshi twined a lock of Harasawa’s hair around one finger. “Shouldn’t we simply avoid the more well-travelled roads, as we have been?”

“They may well have scouts along the river, and even the less-travelled places. They’ll be looking for a pair like us.”

“Hmm,” Imayoshi said, “then we must make sure they don’t see us.” His fingers trailed down the front of Harasawa’s shirt. Harasawa caught his hand, and caught another kiss.

“Your Majesty,” he murmured, “this is serious.”

“I know that. Just as I know that you’re too eager to be out of this village. That you didn’t want to stop here at all.” Imayoshi’s hand traced its way up to Harasawa’s neck, caressing a point that was almost enough to make him shudder. “Who is it that you saw, while you were out?”

“My wife.”

It was, Harasawa supposed, perhaps the first time he had managed to surprise Imayoshi. The hand fell away, and Imayoshi stared at him. “Your wife?”

“She was at one time, anyway. She’s married to someone else, now. I told her to let everyone think I was dead.” Harasawa stood up, not able to endure the ache in his back any longer. He sat on the bed again. “I haven’t seen her in years.”

“How many years?”

“Since about a year after the war ended.” Harasawa closed his eyes. “I was all but useless, recovering from… Well. She didn’t need me, and I wasn’t suited to farming.” He stared at the ceiling. “So I left. I wasn’t much suited to being a father, either.”

Water sloshed as Imayoshi stood, pulling a length of linen around his waist as he crossed to the bed. “You have children?”

Harasawa glanced at him. “Many men my age do, Your Majesty, it’s just a question of whether or not they know about it.”

“They’re here.”

“Somewhere, yes, I haven’t seen them. They were too young to remember much at all about me, anyway. I doubt they even remember that whoever their mother’s married to now didn’t sire them.” He glanced at Imayoshi. “Not sure why that bothers you.”

Imayoshi ignored that statement. “You should bathe while the water’s still hot.”

Being in no mood to continue discussing his family, Harasawa stood. Imayoshi helped his vest off of him, took his sword belt. It was remarkable, sometimes, just how quiet he could be.

He pulled off his tunic, and Imayoshi’s fingers brushed over that scar again. Harasawa let out a breath.

“I’ll get us something to eat,” Imayoshi murmured.

Harasawa wanted to tell him not to bother, that they didn’t have the money, but he was tired, and hungry, and he only nodded.

He washed and dried before Imayoshi returned. He had little enough appetite but he wouldn’t waste food when their purses were so light. He scraped the last leavings off of his plate and stretched out on the bed, for what he told himself would only be a doze. He woke sometime later, a little before nightfall.

He found Imayoshi out in the dining hall, sharing a drink with a group of people who seemed already quite entranced with him. Imayoshi spotted him across the room and waved him over. “Sir,” he said, smiling, “I was just telling these men how we’re looking for some employment. They’re traveling south along the Thread.”

“Oh?” Harasawa asked. “What have I missed, then?”

They were merchants, taking furs and other luxury items to the south to trade at the ports, for silks and that sort of thing. “Normally a wagon full of furs doesn’t call for hired guards,” one told Harasawa, “but there’s been trouble on the roads. I heard that near King’s Mount seven men were found burned alive and robbed of all their possessions.”

_Should have robbed them,_ Harasawa thought, avoiding Imayoshi’s eye, _might have had something worth selling._ “That is troublesome,” he said, “my squire and I only narrowly avoided being attacked by highwaymen on our way here.”

“Perhaps we can come to an agreement, then,” the merchant said, and Harasawa smiled.

“Perhaps we can.”

#

“That was clever,” Harasawa said, draping his shirt over the end of the bed. “Hiding us and adding to our funds at the same time.”

“I thought so,” Imayoshi replied with a smile, pulling his boots off. “I took the liberty of sampling their wares, already.”

“Hm. How so?”

Imayoshi reached into his shirt, where he’d hidden the thing. “It’s a particular kind of oil,” he said, “good for all sorts of things of an intimate nature.”

Harasawa’s face flamed as if he were a blushing boy again. Small mercy that the lamp did little to light the room, and so it was not bright enough to see how red he’d gone. “You can’t have bought that from them.”

“You’d be right, I pinched it when no one was looking.” He smiled. “It’s only a small bit, hardly worth noticing that it’s gone. We’re escorting them all the way to the Thread, surely it wouldn’t hurt to test their product.”

Harasawa stood beside the bed, adding more oil to the lamp so that it would burn a little longer. “And just what did you have in mind, Your Majesty?”

It was easy to forget a lot of things, straddling Imayoshi on that narrow bed. Easy, mostly, to forget that the world still existed outside of that room as Imayoshi’s hands drew along his waist, one settling over his cock as he rode his prince, his breath ragged. Imayoshi focused his attention on Harasawa’s throat, his teeth finding this spot and that that shrank Harasawa’s awareness down to Imayoshi’s mouth, his hands. He was only half conscious of the things he was gasping. “Your Majesty… Shouichi…”

Imayoshi’s free hand grasped his hip, fingers pressing into Harasawa’s ass. The hand around his cock tightened, and Imayoshi paused his attentions just long enough to murmur, “Katsunori.”

Harasawa shuddered and gave. Imayoshi thrust into him a few more times, let out a soundless sigh against Harasawa’s neck.

They washed up in what was left of the bath, and stretched back out across the bed. Imayoshi tucked up alongside Harasawa, neatly putting Harasawa between him and the wall. “You realize,” Harasawa said, “it would be considered untoward to do that sort of thing while travelling with our new employers.”

“There’s a way around everything,” Imayoshi replied, drawing his fingers in lazy lines up Harasawa’s stomach. “And I have a knack for finding it.”

#

Morning came too soon. Too restless to sleep much longer, Harasawa was careful not to wake Imayoshi as he extracted himself from the bed. He went to the stable to check on the horses, and busied himself walking a short distance up the road from the tavern.

His new employers were preparing their wagon for the journey ahead, making sure their goods were protected from the elements. Harasawa would have just passed them with a nod and a greeting, but he spotted a girl with a basket of apples, hardly more than sixteen. He might not have noticed her at all, except that he knew her face, knew it because he’d used to see it in his mother, and in hers.

She noticed him and came over with a smile. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it, sir? Maybe you’d like to buy some apples? They’re the first crop of the season, the sweetest apples you’ll ever taste.”

He found a few coins to give her, taking an apple each for Tyrant and Ranger. He mumbled his thanks, not sure what else to say.

She looked at him curiously. “I’m sorry, sir, have we met? You look so familiar…”

He managed a smile. “We haven’t. I’d remember a girl as sweet as you. You remind me of my daughter.”

She smiled, and curtseyed rather prettily, as if she’d been watching a lady. “All the best to you, sir.”

He raised an apple as if it were a toast, his chest tight. “All the best to you, miss.”


	6. Armor

Harasawa did not consider himself a proud man. He had certainly made worse choices than this, and likely he would make worse choices later… and yet there was something inherently depressing about having been hired on to act as guard for a merchant’s wagon, even if it was largely to hide himself and the person he was charged with protecting. It felt like something and old knight who was no longer useful was consigned to do.

He refused to acknowledge the whisper in the back of his head that he _was_ an old knight and likely had not been useful in quite some time.

Perhaps, also, it was easier to feel a sense of disappointment about his current situation than to acknowledge that he was irritated beyond belief by the good time Imayoshi seemed to be having with it. Truly, if he ever looked even marginally put out by something, Harasawa supposed he would have to be worried.

Harasawa didn’t speak much to their employers—they believed he was naturally reticent, when rather, he simply could not be bothered to keep up inane conversation the way Imayoshi could. It seemed to be a talent of his, to keep them talking, about anything.

One night as they camped, and Harasawa took the first watch, Imayoshi commented that the more they talked about themselves, the less they would think to ask questions about the two of them.

Imayoshi was good with people, Harasawa couldn’t deny that. He could pull all their strings and make them think they chose of their own volition.

It made him wonder.

Keeping watch gave him too much space to think.

Imayoshi woke early for watch that night, coming over to stand next to Harasawa, sliding his hand across Harasawa’s back. “There’s no one out there,” he said. When Imayoshi said it, it sounded like certainty. “We could have a few minutes to ourselves.”

They stole their moments alone like pickpockets in a crowded market, here, a kiss, there, a few minutes in the middle of the night when no one would notice they were missing. It almost made the rest of the journey bearable.

Harasawa bent, pressed a kiss to Imayoshi’s lips. “If you’re awake anyway,” he said, “then I’m going to bed.”

Imayoshi gave him a look that might almost have been wounded, if Harasawa hadn’t known better. “Well then,” he said, “I suppose I’ll keep watch out here in the cold and lonely night by myself.”

Harasawa shook out his bedroll, and sat down to pull off his boots. “I suppose you will.”

“Truly, sir, I don’t know how I shall stave off the boredom.”

“You’ll find a way, I’m sure.” Harasawa turned over, putting his back to Imayoshi. The last thing he heard before he closed his eyes was Imayoshi’s chuckle.

He slept as well as he might have expected (poorly) and woke tired and stiff at the first light of dawn. Imayoshi crouched by the fire, stoking the coals. Harasawa stumbled down to the river, splashing water on his face. “I don’t suppose you know how to cook anything,” he called back to Imayoshi.

“Not at all. You?”

“Not if you want to survive the eating of it.” Harasawa stood drying his face on his shirt. It was unfair to feel so awful without having had a single drink the night before. He shook his head and climbed back up the slope to their little camp. They were a few days yet from where that tributary joined to the Thread, where they would part ways with their employers. Harasawa thought it couldn’t come soon enough.

Imayoshi sat back from the fire, quite pleased with his work. “You’re so concerned about our watches I’m rather worried about the negligence you displayed when it was just the two of us.”

“There were more distractions, then.” Harasawa rubbed his shoulder where it ached. “How many days has it been since we left your home?” It had grown absurdly easy to talk about their situation in code. ‘Your home,’ ‘your father.’

“Not yet a full month,” Imayoshi answered cheerfully. “My father is almost certainly ready to burst into flame, by now.”

Harasawa didn’t find the remark amusing. “He’ll grow more desperate, the longer we evade him.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” Imayoshi warmed his hands, though Harasawa couldn’t imagine he was cold. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“It is more protection than we had before,” Harasawa agreed, “but if you had the thought then isn’t it likely that someone looking for you would think about it, too?” Harasawa looked down the river. “We should be coming on a village soon. We can’t be sure there won’t be people looking for us… I don’t suppose you can negotiate for us to be paid before we reach it, without making our employers suspicious.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Imayoshi yawned. “What should we do, if anyone does recognize us?”

“I suppose we could do what we seem to have a knack for doing—I get hurt and you light something on fire.” Harasawa rubbed his aching shoulder again.

“I wouldn’t call that a fair assessment of our time together, sir.” Imayoshi smiled. Harasawa almost smiled back.

“Make sure you eat well,” Harasawa said. “If we’re forced to depart… abruptly I can’t promise you there will be anything to eat for a while.”

Imayoshi nodded. He had complained remarkably little about anything, since they had left on this little escapade. His chief concern seemed to be how much wool itched. Harasawa wondered if he ever complained about anything.

It seemed unnatural, for someone his age to be so reticent about discomfort.

It made Harasawa wonder if Imayoshi was used to it.

No one was up yet, so Harasawa bent, putting a hand on Imayoshi’s shoulder and a putting a kiss to his forehead.

“That’s almost sentimental,” Imayoshi teased.

“Careful I don’t throw you in the river,” Harasawa answered, patting his shoulder. “Get our horses saddled.”

“Why am I doing all this again?”

Harasawa smiled. “Because you’re my squire, remember?”

“I’m not convinced you aren’t being lazy.”

“Squires should keep their opinions to themselves.”

#

How Imayoshi did it, Harasawa hadn’t the faintest idea, but they were paid the morning before they reached the village, and their employers were happy to do it. “I wish you luck on your journey ahead!” One said, smiling at Harasawa as if they were friends. “I’ll be sorry to see the two of you go.”

The feeling was not mutual. Harasawa only nodded and said he was glad they had been going the same way. They had enough money, at least, that they would be able to fill their packs again, and get a room, if there was no trouble.

Imayoshi was busy tending to their horses. Ranger had grown inexplicably troublesome whenever Imayoshi was near, and Harasawa couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He shied from Imayoshi, gave him trouble just in being saddled. Harasawa had never seen him do anything like it.

Harasawa caught his reins, soothing the horse. Ranger snorted, ears flicking to keep tabs on Imayoshi. “Hey, now,” Harasawa murmured. “What’s all this trouble about?”

“I don’t know why you talk to horses like that.” Imayoshi had turned back to Tyrant, tying his bags to the saddle.

Harasawa patted Ranger’s neck. “I used to be a stable hand.”

“Ah, well, that explains it.” Imayoshi pulled himself into the saddle. “We’ve been paid?”

“We have.” Harasawa glanced at him. “How did you manage that one?”

“You keep asking for my secrets, I’m going to have to keep telling you that you can’t have them.” Imayoshi smiled. “Better hurry—they’re slow to get up but they’re certainly impatient once they get going.”

That morning’s ride was a peaceful one. They joined with traffic on the road, passing other travelers and merchants. The city they were going to was a fairly large one, being a river port, funneling trade to and from the sea. Being among people was their best hope at passing unnoticed, but Harasawa could not help but worry about their numbers, knowing he could not watch them all, that he might miss a threat.

They came round a hill on the road, and the city came into view. At its gates, a small camp of royal soldiers.

Harasawa and Imayoshi glanced at each other. Parting from their group now would look suspicious. It was possible they would not be stopped at all.

It was possible that the soldiers would stop anyone who might be them.

“Stick close,” Harasawa muttered.

Imayoshi nodded, falling a little behind Harasawa. Harasawa let out a breath, trying to relax his shoulders. It would not help him at all to look nervous.

“Just look angry at the inconvenience,” Imayoshi said, “you’ll be more convincing.”

Harasawa held in his annoyance. He caught Imayoshi’s smirk out of the corner of his eye, and he was sure his glower must have deepened. It didn’t help that he knew that Imayoshi meant to aggravate him. “You’re lucky I’ve decided I’m on your side,” Harasawa said.

“I know that, sir.” Imayoshi smiled pleasantly at him.

The soldiers were gathered along the road, and seemed to be stopping everyone entering the city. Harasawa tightened his grip on the reins.

One of their employers leaned over from the driver’s bench on the wagon. “What do you suppose that’s about?”

“There’s rumors that someone kidnapped the prince the day he was meant to begin his tour,” Imayoshi said, as if they were discussing the weather. “I suppose they must be looking for him.”

“Kidnapped the prince? How would they manage that?”

“Not without help,” Harasawa said, glancing at Imayoshi.

Imayoshi smiled.

“Halt!” They stopped before a bored-looking group of soldiers, who spoke to the merchants, first.

“What’s all this, then?”

“We’re looking for a man, charged with crimes against the crown. We’d like to search you and your party.”

“How will you know which man you’re looking for?”

“This one has a distinctive scar on his back.”

Harasawa’s blood froze in his heart. They were looking for him by his scar, for the one thing that had shamed his entire life.

He would rather die than be found that way.

“Well, we don’t have anything to hide,” the merchant said. “Look us over, and our guards, if you wish.”

A streak of fire shot along the soldiers’ camp, taking up a row of tents. It startled Harasawa as much as it startled the soldiers, seeing their campsite burst into flames. Tyrant flew past him in a blur, Imayoshi bent low over his back.

Harasawa spurred Ranger after him, hearing the shouts of the soldiers rise up behind them. “Don’t let them get away! Capture them!” An arrow whistled past Harasawa’s ear, so close he could have sworn the fletching brushed his face.

They peeled away from the city walls, climbing the hill with royal arrows chasing their heels, and into the forest. The fire in their camp would slow them, but not for long.

Harasawa couldn’t say how long they rode—they slowed only so that it wouldn’t kill the horses, hiding themselves far away from any trail, in a little hollow where a thin trickle of a stream ran. Harasawa didn’t even look at Imayoshi at first, tending to Ranger and Tyrant, making sure they were alright. If anything happened to the horses it would be their death sentence.

Assuring himself that they would be alright, as long as they had the chance to rest, Harasawa became aware that he could hear Imayoshi’s breathing, and that it was pained.

He turned, not sure what he expected to see.

Imayoshi had his fingers pressed into his side, just below his ribs, the shaft of an arrow extending between his first and second fingers, blood seeping into his clothes. He noticed Harasawa looking and managed a smile. “You’re not supposed to tear them out, right? Because… of the arrowhead.” He panted, looking pale. “It does more damage pulled backwards, so you have to… push it through.”

“I’ve treated arrow wounds before!” Harasawa snapped, though his hands were shaking. He bent, pulling out his dagger to cut the shirt away from Imayoshi’s wound. Stupid, he’d been _stupid!_ They shouldn’t have gone near the city at all, they should have parted ways with the merchants and gone the long way, resupplying at some insignificant village.

He carefully cut away the bloodied wool, finding where the arrow had struck him. Imayoshi was sure not to get in his way, balancing his bloodied hands on the ground he sat on, painting the weeds.

“Can you cauterize it?” Harasawa whispered.

“Yes,” Imayoshi gasped, his fingers digging into the dirt. Blood oozed out of the wound, and Harasawa had to steel himself.

It was not as bad as it could have been, not as deep—Imayoshi was incredibly lucky, or so he told himself, because he was furious that he had allowed this to happen. Harasawa broke off the fletched end of the shaft. He looked at the wound a moment, and then took the sheath of his dagger from his belt, holding the leather strap out between two hands. “Bite this,” he said, “it’s either this or your tongue.”

Imayoshi acquiesced, the strap between his teeth as Harasawa returned to the task at hand. He had treated dozens of arrow wounds before, his own and others. He was too afraid of this one.

He shoved the arrow through, so that the arrowhead broke through the skin on the other side. Imayoshi made a sound of pain but—blessedly—kept mostly still, ripping a handful of weeds from the earth. Harasawa pulled it through, forgetting for a moment to breathe.

The dagger sheath hit the ground with a dull thud as Imayoshi hunched over, pressing his hands over each side of his wound. For a moment it seemed as if he was illuminated from within, a ripple of fire appearing just under the skin of the wound, and then Imayoshi fell back, the wound closed, and himself exhausted.

Harasawa threw the arrow away and went to the stream to scrub the blood off his hands. He was shaking. “Stupid!” He hissed. “We should have left them this morning.”

Imayoshi laid on his back in the weeds, but he still had it in him to argue. “We couldn’t have known there would be soldiers there.”

“No, but we should have planned for something like it. _I_ should have planned for something like it, instead of letting you get hurt!”

“I’m fine.”

“In that, Your Majesty, we decidedly disagree.” Harasawa dried his hands on his shirt and stalked about, agitated. Imayoshi wasn’t fit to ride, the horses weren’t fit to be ridden. They would have to hide there, he would have to pray they weren’t found. That would mean no fire.

“Harasawa, I will be fine.”

“Regardless, I let you get shot.”

“What were you going to do, throw yourself in front of every arrow? They weren’t even trying to shoot me, as far as they know, my father wants me safely home.” Imayoshi struggled to sit up.

Harasawa took down their bedrolls, unsaddled the horses, because if he did not have something with which to busy himself he would go mad. “I’m not dead, am I?” Imayoshi asked. “And that’s all you’re supposed to do, is keep me alive.”

“If that arrow had struck you elsewhere it might have pierced your liver or your stomach,” Harasawa snarled, turning on him. “Can you save yourself from being poisoned by your own bile?”

“Seems a bit of a moot point, since I wasn’t,” Imayoshi replied sharply.

“I don’t know what damned magic it is you have control over but it doesn’t seem to prevent you from being vulnerable to the same injuries any man is vulnerable to, the injuries it’s my job to protect you from.” Harasawa snapped out the bedrolls, and not knowing what else to do, went to fill their skins with water from the stream.

Curse it, that they couldn’t have a fire, and so he couldn’t busy himself with building one.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this angry,” Imayoshi reflected.

“Is this some kind of joke to you?”

There wasn’t any mirth in Imayoshi’s answer. “Hardly. It hurts rather too much to be a joke. And you’re becoming too much of a pain in the ass.” Imayoshi leaned back in the grass again. “I’d be less concerned about you’re apparent desire to place yourself between myself and every possible injury if you actually wore armor. It’s made for a reason, you know, so that people are less likely to be struck by an arrow.”

Harasawa plunged his hand into the little stream, wishing he could hit something, anything. “I _can’t,”_ he hissed.

Imayoshi was quiet for a moment. “You can’t what?”

“Wear armor.” Harasawa stared into the water, running through a tangle of grass and roots. “My back… I can’t wear it. I’ve had a weakness in my back ever since I survived that fucking battle.” He sat back on his heels, pressing a hand over his eyes. “I should have _died.”_

He heard Imayoshi getting up, and fumbling his way through the grass. He dropped into a sitting place next to Harasawa, a hand still pressed over his wounded side. He grimaced, and stared at Harasawa. “You told me you got that wound trying to save someone. You didn’t tell me what happened to him.”

Harasawa did not want to have this conversation he didn’t want to bring it all up again now, when talking about it would do no good, had never done any good.

Imayoshi’s voice wasn’t loud but it hit him like a punch. “Tell me everything.”

He wanted to tell Imayoshi it was none of his damned concern, that it was all in the past, anyway, what did it matter when nothing changed? _Tell me everything._

He splashed water on his face, as if it might prove Imayoshi to be an illusion, that all this has been a vivid and unfortunate dream and he was, in fact, just waking up from a post-festival drunken stupor. When he looked up, however, Imayoshi was still there, still wounded, and they were still sitting in a thicket where he hoped to every power he could name that they wouldn’t be found. Tell him everything.

Harasawa sat back, running his hand over his face. “An eleven year old stable boy knows better than to think his life means anything,” he said. “He’s only useful as long as he knows how to soothe any horse, to nurse back to health the gelding some lord’s son nearly killed, or to get the foal that isn’t doing well on its feet.” He rubbed the backs of his hands, working at old aches.

“So he tends to the lord’s horses, he sleeps in the same stables he works in because God knows when he’ll be needed. He eats like the servants, from the lord’s table scraps, and he learns his place in the world because that’s all he’ll ever be, is a horse boy, maybe stable master, if he’s truly lucky.

“Knights come through all the time, of course. Ones he hasn’t seen before, ones he wishes he’d never see again. He has plenty of opportunity to watch them, enough so that when he and the other boys are picking up sticks behind the stables and beating the hell out of each other with them, he can clumsily imitate what he’s seen in the yard. He knows footing is important, though he couldn’t say why. Knows a block is just as important as landing a blow. Knows that at the end of the fight he leaves with the fewest bruises, and the other boys are always trying to figure out why.”

He rubbed his face. “Sometimes the knights will come out to watch them, they laugh about it, cheer the boys on while they drink. Most of them think it’s funny, watching these stable boys pretend to be like them. Sometimes, though, one will be more serious about it, watching them the way you watch horses at field, seeing who’s spryest, who has the best temper.

“So sometimes a knight pulls a boy aside, and asks him if he wants to be a squire.” Harasawa folded his hands over each other, held them near his face like prayer, staring off through the thicket so that, at the very least, he didn’t have to look at Imayoshi. “What boy would turn that down?” Harasawa asked. “What boy would say no, knowing that he’s got no other chance like this in life, knowing that this is his one and only chance to make something of himself?”

Imayoshi was silent. Harasawa draped his arms over his knees. “So he leaves. He leaves everything and everyone behind. Just stops long enough to say goodbye to his mother. The knight gets him a horse, a handsome colt—one that boy had kept alive through the long midwinter night it was born on, when the mare had to be put out of her misery and everyone said the colt would follow.”

Harasawa broke from the story a moment, crushing his own wrist under the grip of his hand. “I didn’t sleep a bit that night, keeping that colt alive. They told me to give it up but I think at some point they decided it’d either live or die, and they might as well leave me be. A few days later a mare lost a foal, and I was the one who managed to bond the pair of them. I thought of that colt as mine a long time before I had any right to. Named him Ghost, because he was this pale misty gray, except around his eyes and his hooves. Dark grey, there. He was barely big enough to ride, but it was alright, I was a lot smaller then.”

“So the boy leaves,” Imayoshi prompted, not ungently.

“So the boy leaves,” Harasawa agreed. “This knight wasn’t tied to a particular lord, and probably it was better that way. He traveled a lot, he was young, it seemed like he knew everyone. He was friendly, he was—good. He was honorable.” Harasawa started crushing his own hand again. “He was someone to admire, what boy wouldn’t admire him? His squire certainly did.

“His squire would have done—did do anything that knight asked. He worked harder than he’d ever worked at anything. He learned quickly—he had a good teacher. Barely ten years later and he was knighted, and, he could have gone his own way, but he didn’t. They stopped one place long enough for this boy to marry a girl he thought he could be happy with, and then the war started.

“The Traitor rose up with his army and challenged the king for his throne and,” Harasawa almost laughed, “and again this stupid boy leaves everything to follow this knight, this time into war. And he thought, then, that they could come back heroes, that they’d be honored in this little village and everything would be… at least as good as it was before.

“But what this idiot boy doesn’t realize is that his knight isn’t perfect and that, in fact, any man can die.” Harasawa’s voice tightened. “So he put himself between his knight and an axe blade, took a wound that should have killed him and—and it did nothing.” Harasawa threw one of the skins into the weeds. Imayoshi watched its arc, marked where it disappeared into the brush. “He took a blow that should have killed him and he laid in the dirt, choking on his own blood, watching his knight die.” He was shaking, again.

Imayoshi looked a little less gray, now, a little more focused. “You loved him.”

“For all the good it did me.” Harasawa crushed his hands together. If he didn’t, he was likely to pull out handfuls of his own hair. “As far as I could tell he never had any idea.”

They were quiet, for a moment. Harasawa felt as if he were suffocating. “I never took a squire,” he said, soft, “because I couldn’t let that happen again. It wasn’t as if anyone wanted to be my squire, anyway.” He had to stand, because where he was sitting was beginning to send sharp pains through his back. “And I couldn’t wear armor anymore and it wasn’t like I should have lived through that. Whatever came next would kill me, or it wouldn’t.”

“So you’re ready to die for me because you couldn’t die for him.”

Harasawa didn’t look at Imayoshi.

“You’re useless to me as a dead man,” Imayoshi said. “So if you could stop insisting so much on your own death, I’d appreciate it.” He got to his feet, limping through the weeds to find the discarded skin. He made his way back to where Harasawa had thrown the bedrolls, kicking one out to be mostly flat. He settled on it, and gestured for Harasawa to come over. “After this morning’s excitement, we could both use some rest. Come here.”

Harasawa relented, sitting his back against the trunk of a tree, so he could sit up and keep watch. Imayoshi settled against his shoulder, a subtle glow flickering under his skin. He warmed the blankets, and fell asleep, tucked against Harasawa’s side.

Harasawa rested his arm around Imayoshi’s shoulders, sitting up for a long time. He hadn’t spoken of that story in years, not since the battle that should have killed him. Imayoshi stirred in his sleep, that glow flickering again, a gentle burst of warmth.

He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand anything at all.

Harasawa sighed, laying his cheek against Imayoshi’s hair. Imayoshi was right, he supposed, that he was sentimental. A sentimental fool who hadn’t learned from the last time. He rubbed Imayoshi’s shoulder through the wool shirt. He wouldn’t let him get hurt again. He would be more careful.

The frogs started to sing and bellow, as the sun slipped below the horizon. The air cooled, the horses settled down to sleep. Harasawa had stayed so still, so quiet. Just as he began to drowse, certain that at least they would make it through the night without being found, a salamander slid across the toe of his boot, making its way through the damp grass, and disappearing into the stream.


	7. The Thread

Harasawa didn’t talk much the next day. It was as if the night before had robbed him of his voice, and he only spoke a word or two at a time.

They made their way through the forest, avoiding any too-well traveled roads. They were lucky, at least, that it was still summer. They found a wild apple tree and filled their packs. It was something to eat, until they found something more. Harasawa almost wished he had been an archer, when they startled not one but three bucks grazing in a meadow.

Two days without a proper meal, and they came upon the Thread.

It spanned wide enough to allow two ferries to pass abreast, and several smaller boats as well. The smooth, murky green water had lured more than one man to his death. From the hill where they observed it, Harasawa could see the river curving away, down away from the mountains, toward the sea.

“The king we’ll know we were headed this way,” Harasawa said. “There will be soldiers crawling along the river.”

“Then we’ll just have to avoid them,” Imayoshi replied. He gestured further along the slope. “I hear a stream, that way. I think there may be some ponds.”

“And?”

“And where there are ponds, there might be fish,” Imayoshi said. “I don’t know about you or the horses, but if I eat one more apple I’ll be sick.”

“You… have fished, before, Your Majesty?”

“I’m not without skills of my own, you know.”

They eased their way down through the trees, and came upon the dip where the stream ran through, pooling in a few places to form broad, murky ponds. Imayoshi watched the water for a moment, and swung out of the saddle. “Get comfortable,” he said, “this could take a while.”

He tied his horse, and rummaged through their bags until he found a cloth sack, dumping its contents—namely Harasawa’s clothes—onto the ground. Harasawa started picking them up, grumbling about a disregard for other people, which Imayoshi quite successfully ignored.

He sat on the bank of the pond, pulling off first his boots and then stripping. He hung his clothes neatly over a low branch, easing himself into the water with the sack in hand. Harasawa sighed, patting Ranger. “As long as you’re occupied, I’ll try to see if there’s anything else edible around here.”

Imayoshi didn’t answer. He stood in the water, shoulders slightly hunched, his back to Harasawa. Harasawa wondered if he knew how beautiful he was, even without that smirk that seemed to be such a natural expression for him. When he was given over to concentration, almost unaware of anything else in the world.

He tore his gaze away and moved through the brush. Most of his knowledge of plants was what one shouldn’t eat—and what would kill one’s horse—but it was summer, and there had to be something he could find.

He returned to the pond with an armful of wild leeks, and kerchief full of blackberries, that were already partly crushed and staining the fabric purple. He found Imayoshi on the bank, mercifully having put some of his clothes back on, cleaning two decently sized green trout, scraping their guts into a hole he’d carved into the mud. He glanced up at Harasawa and smiled. “Ah, good, we can have a proper meal.”

“If either of us can figure out how to cook it.”

“It can’t be that difficult.”  

“Have you ever tried to cook anything before, Your Majesty?”

“No.”

“Of course not.” Harasawa set down what he’d brought, and went about finding wood for a fire. He scraped out a shallow pit in the soft soil, stacking the wood in a sort of tent, and sitting back with two thin poles, taking his dagger to peel away the bark, and put a point to one end.

Imayoshi glanced at the wood and went back to the fish as fire crackled up the middle of the stack, catching as if it were parchment. Harasawa presented him with the poles. “Slide them through the sides of the fish, lengthwise,” he said. “I know some of the cooks in the army camps used to cook them that way, when they didn’t have pans. You stick them in the ground like so,” he demonstrated, “so that it cooks at an angle by the fire.”

Imayoshi nodded, and finding he didn’t have much else to do, Harasawa set about roasting the wild leeks as best he could.

He burnt half of them, and only half cooked the rest. Imayoshi cooked the fish all the way through, to his credit, but he also cooked away any moisture, and it seemed the trout had more bones than either of them had expected, which they ended up pulling out of their teeth. The only thing they hadn’t managed to ruin were the blackberries, staining the ends of their fingers and the insides of their lips.

And despite all that, it was worth it just to have a belly full of hot food. It vastly improved Harasawa’s mood, and Imayoshi seemed more at ease, pulling his shirt back on as they doused the fire and saddled up to ride again while there was still light.

In the woods Harasawa could almost forget that they were fleeing for their lives. It was almost as if they really were on tour, however strangely alone they were. He could almost forget it until they stopped to camp, and Imayoshi slid under his blanket, and all Harasawa could see was the new scar on Imayoshi’s skin. He brushed his fingers over it, as if afraid the wound might open again, and Imayoshi pulled his hand away, pressed his arm up over his head and kissed him as if he meant to steal the breath from Harasawa’s throat.

Afterward, Imayoshi curled up next to him, face smoothed over in sleep, that orange glow flickering under his skin every so often, so that they did not need to keep a fire that might alert someone to their presence. Harasawa would never have admitted that it was the best he had slept in a long time.

Conversation did not come as easily. He would have liked to say it was the kind of silence that came when you had said all that needed to be said—but he knew better.

It was the silence that came when you felt you had said too much.

The cover of the trees afforded them some safety, but it also hid the sky from them, and the first rumble of thunder was all the warning they had.

They came down the slope in a torrent of rain, trying to get to the shelter of the river valley. The lightning flashed and Ranger spooked, and it was all Harasawa could do to get him under control again. Tyrant—to Harasawa’s surprise, when he realized it—reacted to the thunderstorm by not reacting to it much at all. The horse paused when the lightning blinded him, and moved forward in the dim light of the rain, keeping a steady footing in the quickly muddying slope.

Imayoshi took the lead, head bowed against the rain. Harasawa followed, doing what he could to keep Ranger from panicking. If he took off in weather like this, there was simply no way he wouldn’t get himself killed.

“Harasawa,” Imayoshi shouted over his shoulder. “There’s a house up here.”

They turned through the brush toward it. It wasn’t so much a house as a shack, a hunter’s winter shelter, from the look of it, with a shed built against it where they could put the horses. They were quick in unsaddling them, and Harasawa soothed Ranger, murmuring until the horse was settled in, however uneasily.

They ducked out of the rain and into the shelter. Harasawa stood at the door, dripping while Imayoshi put wood in the little hearth, building a fire.

One room, with the walls stacked with a week or two’s food. Dried fruits and roots, anything that would keep for quite a long time. Harasawa was already calculating how much they could take.

“There’s not much of a bed,” Imayoshi said, nodding toward a pile of furs—or not a pile, rather, as it was two huge bearskins, heaped near the hearth. A cord ran from one wall to the other in front of the hearth—something to hang their clothes from to dry.

Harasawa pulled off his soaked shirt, draping it over the line. Imayoshi stood to follow suit—catching a chill wouldn’t help either of them.

Harasawa sat to pry off his boots. Imayoshi’s fingers brushed the top of the scar.

He couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything except remember to breathe while Imayoshi traced the lines of that scar. He remembered a ghost of the blow, the taste of copper in his mouth that he’d realized was blood.

The hand drew away, and it was as if something dislodged in the back of Harasawa’s throat. “The day you called for me,” he said, “they told me the king asked for me by name. It was you, wasn’t it?”

Imayoshi sat in front of the fire, arms folded across his knees. “I was keeping an eye on all the knights who spent a great deal of time in the castle. Nobody thought it was odd, I have the right to request particular guards.”

“What and you picked the one who spent most of his time drinking?”

“That wasn’t the measure I took, watching you.”

Harasawa set his boots to dry by the fire, stood to hang up the rest of his clothes. “What did you think of me, then?”

“That you could have left, and no one would have stopped you. But you stayed, either because you didn’t know any other way to live or because you couldn’t bear the thought of being anything else. Either way it became apparent you still had some sense of duty to the throne, and that’s what I was counting on.”

“Plenty of men have that sense of duty.”

“Not like you.” Imayoshi didn’t seem in a hurry to elaborate.

“I just don’t understand why you would want me,” Harasawa said, “when there were a dozen or more who were younger, fitter, who would have been more useful to you.”

“Men who would have been too frightened to be of any use to me,” Imayoshi replied. “Men who had something to lose and could have too easily been intimidated into betraying me.”

Ah, that was it. “And I had nothing to lose,” Harasawa said.

“Nothing but your honor, or so I hoped. So far you don’t seem to have proven me wrong.”

Harasawa began laying out the rest of their things to dry, so he wouldn’t have to look at Imayoshi. Every boom of thunder hummed through the walls of the shack. The flashes of lightning peeked through the cracks in the wall, around the edges of the door. The storm was likely to last the rest of the day, at least into the night.

“Of course,” Imayoshi said, “there was always the risk that your honor would work against me, so I could just as well ask you why you chose me over my father.”

Harasawa hung up their blankets, which had gotten damp. “I didn’t know whether I believed you or not, at first,” he said. “Whether this was all some grand scheme that would result in you having me killed in some power play I didn’t understand.”

“Did you change your mind?”

“I decided…” Harasawa hesitated. “I decided it didn’t matter. That I would trust you.” He pulled over the bearskins, settling on one. “I don’t understand why your father would want his only heir dead. I’ve thought it over a thousand times and I can’t think of an explanation for it, except I suppose that you might be a changeling who should have died in the cradle and not actually his son.”

“Truly, I’m flattered by the comparison.”

“What I do know,” Harasawa said, “Is that sooner or later all kings die. It’s the king who dies without an heir who leaves a bloody power struggle in his wake, and if the king succeeds in disposing of you, the only thing it will bring is war.” He was aware that Imayoshi was watching him, but he couldn’t bring himself to look. He felt it would be like looking at the sun. “People have seen enough war,” he said, soft. “I don’t want my children to see it too. If I do nothing else for them, I can do that.”

“That’s damnably noble of you.” Harasawa couldn’t be sure if he was imagining it or if Imayoshi sounded sincere.

“I think we’re near the Traitor’s old stronghold,” Imayoshi said. “It was along the Thread, wasn’t it?”

Harasawa nodded. “He hid in these hills with the twenty or so witches he’d imprisoned. That’s what caused us the most trouble, was the witches. After the last battle it was thought they saw their chance, and set fire to the Traitor and his ranks, and that was what won the battle. Most of them disappeared after that, and I heard it all second or third hand so I don’t know what to make of the stories, really…” Harasawa glanced at him. “Except that it may not have been witches that sent the Traitor’s army up in flames.”

Imayoshi smiled. “I heard that that fire burned for days.”

“It’s why you won’t see any trees older than you in this part of the forest,” Harasawa said. “I saw the aftermath, well enough, and it was months later by the time I saw it. You could taste the ash in the water, in the wind…”

Imayoshi had settled next to him, tracing his fingers over Harasawa’s cheek, along the line of his jaw. “Katsunori,” he murmured. “I’m tired of talking about war.”

Men like him would do well to avoid people who go around starting fires, Harasawa thought. Men like him were the sunbaked grass after midsummer, as fragile as parchment, as easy to burn.

Men like him all too easily became ashes.

Imayoshi’s fingers brushed over his throat, took hold there. “Your Majesty,” Harasawa murmured, Imayoshi’s lips brushing over his. “What are you, really?”

Imayoshi’s breath was hot against his throat. “Prince of the realm, heir to the throne, your future king, if all of this goes well…” He grasped a handful of Harasawa’s hair, pulling his head back to expose his throat. “More importantly,” he murmured, “what am I to you, Katchan?”

For a moment Harasawa’s heart forgot how to beat. He fell back on the bearskin, pulling Imayoshi on top of him. “The one thing I have to lose.”

Imayoshi let go of his hair, brushed it away from his face almost tenderly. “You aren’t saying that just so I can be wrong about something, now…”

“I think you’ll find me too damnably noble for that sort of thing, Your Majesty.” Harasawa shifted under him, ran a hand up Imayoshi’s back. “I don’t suppose you have any more of our former employer’s product…”

Imayoshi’s smile could have cut him to ribbons. “How should we make use of it, Katchan?”

Harasawa’s voice almost failed him. “Get it first, I want…” Heavens above, he couldn’t believe he was asking for this.

“What do you want?” Imayoshi prodded, as if he already sensed he was going to like the answer.

“I want to kneel before my future king.”

He took some gratification from Imayoshi’s brief, surprised silence. He laughed then, bending to grant some attention to the scar on Harasawa’s hip that seemed to be his favorite. “You do surprise me, sometimes, Katchan.”

He got the shiver he surely wanted and went to rummage through his pack. The thunder made the walls hum once more, rain beating down on the roof. If nothing else, they’d be assured no one was going to find them until the storm ended.

Imayoshi took his time with preparing Harasawa, leaning up to kiss him, to test his teeth at Harasawa’s throat, enjoying the flush that Harasawa felt burning in his face. His gaze was almost too much, smoke-gray eyes holding Harasawa down like a hand at his throat.

When he was ready, Harasawa shifted onto his hands and knees, a tremor running through his shoulders. Imayoshi leaned over him, tongue running from one end of the scar up, and Harasawa’s breath hissed between his teeth. Imayoshi’s movements began slow and patient, his fingers in Harasawa’s hair again, pulling him back, and the dizziness that swirled in Harasawa’s head meant it took him a moment to make out the words being murmured in his ear.

“Is that alright?”

“Yes,” Harasawa gasped, trying to work out the meaning of the question. It was as Imayoshi adjusted his pace that he realized—his back. Imayoshi was asking it was alright for his back.

Imayoshi was pressed flush against the back of him, releasing his grip on Harasawa’s hair so he could loop his arm around Harasawa’s neck. Harasawa slid onto his forearms, overwhelmed by the heat, by the beat of his pulse against Imayoshi’s breath in his ear. He was making sounds he wasn’t aware he could make, wanting, needing, and, heaven help him, he needed Imayoshi.

“Shou,” he gasped, “Shouichi,”

“Shh,” Imayoshi murmured, his fingernails scraping Harasawa’s shoulder. “I’m here, Katchan.”

The sound that Harasawa made came from some place in his chest, torn out of him like a sob, like something breaking free. A thunderclap shook the place and Harasawa collapsed on the bearskin, feeling that thunder all through his spine, through every bone, every inch of his own skin. Imayoshi followed him at the next stroke of lightning, sighing into Harasawa’s hair.

He rolled onto his side next to Harasawa, lazily kissing his face, his throat, his chest. Harasawa had to catch his breath, gather himself. He pulled Imayoshi up, into his chest. Imayoshi steadied himself with a hand on his shoulder, returning Harasawa’s kiss without hurry.

“Shou—Your Maj—”

Imayoshi shushed him, kissing him again. He seemed to have softened around the edges, relaxed. “What is it, Katsunori?”

Gray like smoke, gray like storms. Gray like the sea when the clouds pulled close in their ranks. Be careful of people who start fires.

“Nothing,” he murmured, rubbing his thumb across Imayoshi’s cheek. “Nothing, Your Majesty.”


	8. The Walker in the Woods

In the cool of the morning Harasawa found a wood axe in the shack. Imayoshi found him splitting limbs that had come down in the storm, the dull _thunk_ of the axe through green wood falling into dead air. “Might I ask why you’re making firewood?”

“Because I intend to take about three days’ worth of food from this place, and I can’t in good conscience do it without leaving something behind for the hunter we’re stealing from.” He nodded at the wood he’d already split and piled. “Take that inside, it won’t do anyone any good if it rots. Stack it neatly, by the hearth.”

“The work never ends, does it,” Imayoshi commented, crouching to begin collecting wood in his arms.

“Be grateful you weren’t born to farming,” Harasawa answered.

“I am, every day.” He nudged the door open with a foot, ducking inside. They worked most of the morning, ate, and filled their packs with the hunter’s food. Harasawa folded the bearskins once more, and they saddled their horses to ride out.

The route Harasawa chose for them took them through the hills that followed the river. It was longer, but they were less likely to encounter soldiers. He knew there to be villages scattered in the valleys, small and hardly ever paid attention to, some with nothing more than walking paths in and out. With any luck they would be able to spare a night’s shelter, if nothing else.

“Your horse was remarkably steady, during the storm.”

Imayoshi glanced at him, and smiled. “That’s why I keep Tyrant. He’s half-wild—”

“More than half."

“—but he’s an excellent horse, when I need him to be. I imagine you chose your horse for similar reasons.”

Harasawa’s silence drew another glance from Imayoshi. “Did I say something wrong?”

Harasawa shrugged. “I didn’t choose Ranger, exactly… the last man who had him was killed by highwaymen. They’d have taken Ranger, too, I expect, except that he was wounded. Bloodied all to hell… it was miracle enough he was alive when I found him, let alone strong enough to walk.”

“So you nursed him back to health, and I imagine everyone else thought you were mad for doing it,” Imayoshi said.

Harasawa looked away. “Well. The horse I had then was getting old.”

“You needn’t sell it as something purely practical, Katchan,” Imayoshi laughed. “I like your sentimentality.”

Harasawa smiled, just a little.

The climb into the hills was a slow one, marked by the thickening of the brush, and the dense, heavy quiet. Harasawa hardly dared to breathe for fear of drawing the attention of the creatures that lived within those hills. It was not superstition to fear the silent woods. Only fools took no notice when the birds seemed to grow quiet.  
  
Even Imayoshi was not unaffected by it. His amiable quiet had turned into a wary one, sticking close to Harasawa without needing to be told.  
  
Harasawa was ready to turn back on ill-feeling alone when the broke upon the road. It was a little thing, wide enough for a single rider and perhaps a man on foot. Likely it was the road from one little village to another, for it was too wide to be a hunter's trail.  
  
Seeing the road, and the gleam of sunlight that winked through the leaves overhead, did much to ease him. Still, he did not raise his voice much when he spoke to Imayoshi. "We'll follow this road to the next village," he said. "Likely they're too isolated to have heard anything that might make them suspicious of us."  
  
"And if they aren't?"  
  
Harasawa felt the grim set to his mouth. "Then your father's reach is farther than I thought."  
  
They passed no one on the road, but at least the rustle of wings told him that birds were present, if still eerily quiet. The hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle again, his ears searching for any sound in the brush, any sound besides the steps and breath of their horses.  
  
The dimming of the light told Harasawa it was near dusk when they came upon the village, smoke rising from the chimneys of cook fires, and not a soul outside. "Do all country folk retire so early?" Imayoshi asked.  
  
"No," Harasawa said, an uneasy feeling settling in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps they should have turned back after all.  
  
Someone must have seen them from a window or door, for a shout went up, and a dozen or more faces appeared from behind the nearest doors, hesitant, unsure who might be coming to their homes at sundown. Harasawa found himself unable to introduce them, he was so bothered by the whole place.

Imayoshi seemed to realize he was not going to speak and offered a smile to the villagers. "Apologies for our arriving at such a late hour--the good sir and I were hoping to find a place where we might sup and sleep the night. We've been traveling a great while and--"  
  
"Are you ghosts?" a man asked.  
  
"Beg pardon?" Imayoshi asked.  
  
"They don't seem like ghosts," a young woman put in, looking them up and down.  
  
Harasawa spoke at last. "Why would we be ghosts?"  
  
The woman looked up at him, scrutinizing his face, as if it might reveal him to be an illusion. "The Walker lets no knight or soldier pass alive, so everyone knows."  
  
Imayoshi looked to be about to ask further questions. Harasawa silenced him with a gesture. He dismounted, and took his dagger from its sheath. The young woman took a step back from him. He pressed the tip of the blade to his forearm, drawing a shallow scratch. A thin line of blood welled up, which he showed her.  
  
It satisfied her. "And the other?"  
  
"Shouichi," Harasawa said. "Show her that you can bleed."  
  
"Why—"  
  
"Ghosts don't bleed," Harasawa said sharply. He turned his dagger over to Imayoshi, hilt first. Imayoshi grimaced as at something he found distasteful, but he followed suit, offering his arm up for inspection. The young woman did not touch him, or even really go near him, but she nodded.  
  
"They are living," she said. "The Walker has not yet found them."  
  
Imayoshi did not dismount from his horse. "What is the Walker?"  
  
It was the man who answered--Harasawa guessed from the resemblance he was the young woman's father. "The witch-cursed beast that haunts these woods," he said. "He leaves us well enough alone, so long as we keep to ourselves, but any soldier or such as you who passes by this place he devours, as he has for some sixteen years now."  
  
"If we give you shelter it will put our families at risk," the woman said. "I am sorry, but we can do nothing for you."  
  
They would consign a stranger to death to protect themselves. Harasawa understood it. He and Imayoshi were nothing to them, not in comparison to the safety of their families. "Could you give us food, at least, and some wood to burn? And this boy--" Harasawa gestured over his shoulder at Imayoshi. "He is not my squire, nor a knight or soldier of any kind. Give him a place to sleep, and I will camp at the edge of your village, whatever happens to me may happen."  
  
He was aware of the needle-sharp pinprick of Imayoshi's gaze on the back of his neck.  
  
The elder man looked unconvinced. "I see no wisdom in giving food to a dead man. And true or not, what you say about the boy, the Walker will kill him nonetheless. He knows the scent of this place, and any outsider he will find, and kill the family who shelters them."  
  
"It is just as well," Imayoshi replied lightly, "for what the good sir has said is untrue. I am his squire, and I will remain with him."  
  
Harasawa felt the sharp cut of defeat, and with it the brief but powerful urge to strangle Imayoshi.  
  
"We will camp at the edge," Imayoshi said, "and wait for this 'Walker.' If we survive, perhaps you will be kind enough to grant us some food for our journey." He gave the same smile he had given when he had made his attempt to introduce them.  
  
The man eyed them skeptically. "If you survive, then the Walker would have to be dead."  
  
"And thus it benefits the both of us," Imayoshi answered. "We are alive and you are freed of the beast. But maybe you will have room for our horses in a barn--there is no reason the beast should take them, too, and you may have use for the creatures, if we die."  
  
The woman was looking at them, measuring their worth. "Let them do it, Papa. If the Walker kills them, then it is the same as it was yesterday."  
  
So it was decided. "If we die here I will drag us both out of hell so I can kill you myself," Harasawa muttered.  
  
Imayoshi spurred Tyrant forward, glancing at Harasawa. "Wouldn't that defeat your grand desire to protect my life at the cost of your own?"  
  
Harasawa scowled at him, leading Ranger by the reins. "Is that not what a man charged with defending the life of the prince should do?" he hissed.  
  
Imayoshi smiled at him, and didn't answer.  
  
They built a fire near the trees, by conventional means, as Harasawa thought it unlikely the villagers would take well to witnessing Imayoshi's particular talents. They ate a little, the villagers retreated to their homes, and the sky grew darker. The silence gathered.  
  
Harasawa paced past the fire, not quite able to get still. "You're making me dizzy," Imayoshi said, stoking the coals. "Maybe that's what you mean to do, though? Dizzy the creature into submission."  
  
"If I'd listened to my gut we wouldn't be here," Harasawa muttered. "This whole place feels wrong."  
  
"Sixteen years of having a 'witch-cursed' monster and I'd imagine any place would feel wrong."  
  
"How can you sit there so casually?" Harasawa scowled at him. "If you've got some plan I'd like to hear it."  
  
"I don't," Imayoshi answered. "Or rather, I have a few ideas, but seeing as how reticent they were to even describe the beast, I really can't know which one would work best."  
  
"You're impossible," Harasawa muttered.  
  
"Don't pretend it isn't what you like about me." His smile could have torn the clothes off an impressionable young person, which Harasawa thanked the stars he was not. Instead, his scowl deepened, and he went back to pacing, reaching for his sword at every noise, real or imagined.  
  
Imayoshi watched him for a while. "You'll exhaust yourself before the creature ever shows up, if indeed it is a real thing and not a compelling story the villagers have devised to keep outsiders away."  
  
"No," Harasawa said. "It's not just a story, I can feel it." The place was too quiet, the surprise and suspicion with which the villagers had greeted them too clear. Something gave them good reason for that suspicion. Their story was too specific. _The Walker lets no knight or soldier pass alive._  
  
So everyone knows.  
  
The night dragged on, suffocating in its silence. Even at night, there should have been sounds. Owls, frogs--anything. Harasawa could not have slept even if he wanted to.  
  
Imayoshi seemed all too relaxed about it, tending to their fire, and so Harasawa almost missed the way he looked up, scanning the trees. "What is it?" Harasawa asked.  
  
"I hear something," Imayoshi said. "Breathing."  
  
Harasawa tried to hear, but so far as he could tell, nothing stirred. "Where?" he asked, drawing his sword. The weight in his hand felt reassuring.  
  
"Don't bother," Imayoshi said. "If it is what they say it is, it will come to us... and I've no desire to fight it in the dark." He stood in the firelight, his face cast in red light and black shadows. There was an unnerving quality to his face in that light, as if the shadows stretched in the wrong ways, as if his eyes were just a touch too bright. "It smells like a carrion animal."  
  
Harasawa smelled nothing. But he did hear it, now, the body of something huge moving through the forest. At least the size of a bear, from the way it's ragged, panting breath sounded.  
  
Harasawa stood in front of the fire, his shadow cast long against the trees. Fear curled in his blood like a poison, but he had been more frightened than this before. The only thing that mattered, he told himself, was keeping Imayoshi alive.  
  
The creature emerged slowly, broad, bear-like head hanging low from a high, hunched back. It stood in the edges of the light, snuffing, as if tasting their scent on the air. It made a chuffing sound, almost like a low laugh. The beast turned its head, its pale eyes gauging Harasawa as it stared him down.  
  
The creature’s body was all wrong, like a wolf's but too large, hunched at the back to accommodate its shortened hind legs. Its ears were too stunted for a wolf, too pointed for a bear. Its pants echoed in Harasawa's ears, and when it turned its head to the side, rolling its head in a threat, he saw a long, old burn scars. They had to be burn scars, for the sheer size of them.   
  
It made that chuffing sound again, shoulders moving as if it was laughing at them. It stepped forward into the firelight, too-wide paws splaying across the road, long claws scraping the dirt. Harasawa braced himself for the attack—and the thing lunged.   
  
Nothing of that size should have been able to move so fast, Harasawa barely had time to swing his sword up, protecting his chest and throat as the beast threw the full force of its weight upon him, snarling. It knocked him to the ground, claws raking down across him, Harasawa could not tell if they struck or not--the whole of his attention was on the flat of his blade, shoved up against the beast's throat, keeping the yellowed, foul teeth inches from his face.  
  
The blast of hot breath had all the stench of the grave in it, thin rags of flesh still clinging to the beast's teeth. Harasawa tried to get his feet under the beast, he had to shove it off, had to do anything other than continue holding it back as he was, just to keep those teeth out of this throat.  
  
_He would not die here._  
  
A flash of fire blinded him for a moment, and his grasp on the blade slipped, cutting into his hands. The beast roared and reeled back from him, and the smell of burnt hair and flesh filled the air. Imayoshi advanced, drawing the beast's attention away from Harasawa. He circled around the beast, hand raised, threatening to set fire to the beast again.

On the ground, Harasawa tried to get his feet under him, to grasp his sword without alerting the creature. His lungs burned from the effort of trying to pull in a breath, his chest made sounds it shouldn’t have.

The creature did not blindly attack. It eyed Imayoshi, as it had eyed Harasawa, and this time he was certain it was a deep laughter coming from the monster. It laughed, and reared up on its hind legs, at least twice Harasawa's height when it stood.

"I knew," the beast growled, "I knew it was not witch fire that burned me that day." It laughed, barked, almost. "The others were too blind to see it, that their king was more monster than man. I knew, I knew."  
  
"I don't know what you are," Imayoshi said, calmer than he ought to have been, "but I will kill you, for attacking us."  
  
"Try, King. You did not kill me then." The best fell to all fours again, advancing on Imayoshi, stalking him.  
  
Harasawa did not remember getting to his feet, bloodied hands wrapped both around the hilt of his sword. The beast was not looking at him, no longer seemed to see him. It only saw Imayoshi.  
  
Harasawa stumbled forward, and fell onto the beast, plunging his sword between its shoulders. The beast bellowed, throwing itself up on its hind legs again, knocking Harasawa back with a swipe of its claws, slamming him to the ground. He tasted blood, and had only time enough to look up.

His sword had gone through, buried up to the hilt. That should have killed it, should have been enough to kill anything, or nearly.  
  
The beast turned on him, teeth bared, slavering tongue lolling from between its jaws. Harasawa scrabbled backward through the dirt, thinking only to escape it a moment longer, to keep out of its grasp.

To keep its attention on him.  
  
His eyes saw only movement--and Imayoshi was on the beast's back, hands shoved deep into the matted, blood-clotted fur. The beast bellowed, seeming lit from within, smoke pouring from its mouth as it burned from the inside out.  
  
It took only a few moments. The beast fell heavy to the ground, and Imayoshi stepped away, wiping his hands on the leg of his trousers, as if he might brush off the touch. Harasawa half expected to see anger, or relief at having survived the beast. It was more dispassionate.  
  
He had eradicated the threat. Now it no longer mattered.  
  
Harasawa tried to get to his feet, and fell. He spit blood. Imayoshi pulled his arm around his shoulders. "Now," Imayoshi muttered, "perhaps one of these hospitable villagers can patch you up."  
  
Harasawa looked at his hand, hanging uselessly over Imayoshi's shoulder, smearing blood on the wool of his tunic. He muttered a curse, his head spinning.  
  
He remembered little of what went on next. Seeing the creature dead it seemed most of the village came hesitantly out of doors, to see for themselves. That left Harasawa in the care of the young woman and her father who had admitted them to the village.  
  
They pulled him into a room with a hearth, a heavy hide hanging from the door frame to serve as a curtain. There, someone washed and bound his wounds, some he hadn't even realized he had. He was given a cup of water, to rinse the blood from his mouth, a bowl to spit in.  
  
He was vaguely aware of Imayoshi arguing with the girl. "There is but one witch close by and she lives half a day's ride away. Even with the Walker dead you cannot travel these trails in the dark."  
  
"I need to know he will live till morning."  
  
“So long as he is not bleeding under the flesh where I cannot see, he should live." There was a silence, then. "How was it the two of you killed The Walker?"  
  
“It shouldn’t matter to you, now. The beast is dead."  
  
"So he is," she agreed. "I will leave you here. Give him water, when he wakes. In the morning, before you go, his bandages will need to be changed, and it will be better for him if he eats."  
  
After a brief silence, Imayoshi thanked her, and she must have left, because Harasawa heard her voice no more. He became conscious of a low fire in a hearth, and that he was laid out on a bed of hides. Imayoshi sat by the fire, Harasawa thought for a moment inspecting his own hands.  
  
A handful of coals smoldered in Imayoshi's palm.  
  
Harasawa coughed, and the pain would have doubled him over, if he could move. "I shouldn't be surprised to see that," he said.  
  
At the sound of his voice Imayoshi threw the coals back into the fire, turning toward Harasawa. "You're alive, then."  
  
"Yes, till morning, at least, if I can trust that girl's judgment." He tried to sit up, but the blossom of pain in his chest forced him back down.  
  
"Don't try to get up," Imayoshi said. "You've more broken bones than I know what to do with. Even with a healer or witch you'll be here for days."  
  
"Lucky for us no one comes here, then." Harasawa closed his eyes. "Aren't you supposed to be getting me water?"  
  
Imayoshi didn't move, if the silence was any indication. "The thing spoke to me."  
  
"It was a man, once, I think." Harasawa tried to lay as still as he could.  
  
"It called me king."  
  
"I wouldn't have known... until it spoke of witch fire." Harasawa opened his eyes, gazed up at the low, thatched roof. "He mistook you for your father."  
  
Imayoshi was looking at him. Harasawa cast him a glance. "Congratulations, Your Majesty... I believe you just killed the Traitor."  
  
"The Traitor Haizaki died at the end of the war, when his army went up in flames."  
  
"So we thought." Pain clouded Harasawa's vision again. "His witches escaped. Why shouldn't he?"  
  
"And then one cursed him?"  
  
"Perhaps he was dying and already vulnerable. You said only fools find themselves indebted to a witch... I can only imagine what happens to those who seek to take advantage of them."  
  
"Hm." Imayoshi looked at him a moment, and bent to stoke the fire, though why he bothered, Harasawa couldn't imagine. "You should sleep. I have to wait till light to find the witch."  
  
"Are you going to pay her whatever you paid the last one?"  
  
"Get some sleep, Katchan," Imayoshi said, soft. "I'll keep watch."  
  
He was troubled all night by dreams. Most of battle, of the taste of smoke and blood in his mouth. He saw the face of his knight, one moment smiling, alive, the next as he lay dead on the battlefield, waxen, bloodied.  
  
He woke from the pain of his own recoiling, gasping awake and struggling to remember where he was. This was not an infirmary, and why did his chest hurt, he had taken the blow in his back—  
  
Imayoshi was sitting by the bed, pulling his riding cloak on over his shirt, the dark stain of Harasawa's blood still smeared there. He looked at Harasawa and bent, pressing a quick kiss to his lips. "You're too cold," Imayoshi muttered. "I'll put more wood on the fire, before I go."  
  
"What time is it?"  
  
"Just before dawn."  
  
"You're riding out--alone?"  
  
"You're in dire need of someone with more expertise than I," Imayoshi answered. "I've told you before, you're useless to me dead."  
  
Harasawa ignored the remark. "I don't want you to go alone."  
  
"I'm afraid I must, Imayoshi said. "And I'm rather afraid that you can't stop me in your current condition, so it will be easier for the both of us if you don't argue. I'll be gone less than a day, and I've been assured that you're not yet knocking on death's door."  
  
"Shou..."  
  
Imayoshi bent, so that he could lower his voice. "I mean to reach the end of the Thread before winter. For that, I need you on your feet as soon as possible. Otherwise I'll be without my knight." He smiled at Harasawa and pressed another kiss, this time to his forehead. "Do be good. They've agreed to feed you while I'm gone."  
  
Harasawa's voice rasped in his throat. "Take Ranger."  
  
"Tyrant is perfectly capable--”  
  
"Ranger is a mountain horse," Harasawa said. "He knows this kind of terrain." He let out a breath. "He can look after you, at least, even if I can't."  
  
Imayoshi sat a moment, and nodded. "Very well. I may take both horses, as it is, to fetch the healer back." He stood, brushing Harasawa's hair from his eyes. "I'll be back before nightfall."  
  
The day seemed to take an eon. He ate what he could keep down, drank a little water. He slept, fitfully, thanks to some drug the young woman concocted in her kitchen. He kept seeing battle, though the face was different each time. Once, when he woke, still half delirious from the drug, he mistook the young woman for his daughter--and then later for his wife. He asked after Imayoshi each time he woke, to which he was gently informed that his squire hadn't yet returned, and would he please eat.  
  
He worried a fever was taking him. Fever killed more men than war did, and he was no longer sure if he was in a war or not.  
  
The next time he woke, it was in a cloud of mumbling voices. He turned his head, seeing the young woman talking to a woman at least twice her age, if not older, and there, draping his cloak over the chair, listening to the women talk. "Your..."  
  
Imayoshi glanced up and came to his side, smiling a little. "You're still talking. That's good. Do you recognize me?"  
  
"Prince..."  
  
Imayoshi hushed him, grasping his hand. "That's good enough. She tells me you've been asking about your wife and children. Not thinking about going back to settle down, are you now?"  
  
Harasawa scowled, and that seemed to please Imayoshi about his clarity of mind. The older woman's face appeared over his shoulder. "How is he?"  
  
"He seems quite lucid to me," Imayoshi said. "Enough to be displeased with me, at least."  
  
The woman leaned over him, inspecting the bindings on his hands and around his ribs. "You did quite well," she said to the young woman. "I have seen shabbier jobs from people who professed themselves to be skilled healers. Leave now, and I will tend to him."  
  
The young woman left. Imayoshi stayed by the door.  
  
"You as well, squire."  
  
"I prefer not to," Imayoshi said.  
  
"What you prefer is none of my concern."  
  
"Shouichi," Harasawa said, his strength quickly wearing. "Go. I'll be fine."  
  
Imayoshi cast the witch a cool glance, and left at a leisurely step. The witch's mouth pursed and she set to work. "You can call him squire all you wish, sir," she said coolly, "but what that boy is cannot be trained or controlled."  
  
"So I've become aware," Harasawa said.  
  
"Lucky for you he seems to care about you," the witch muttered, holding a bottle up to the firelight to examine its contents. "I did not expect to see one of his kind in these hills, so soon after the last one." She poured something from the bottle into the cup.  
  
"What was the last one?"  
  
"A man like you, traveling in such close quarters with one, and you don't know?"  
  
"There's a lot of things it seems I don't know."  
  
"Hm. Well, drink this."  
  
"What will it do to me, exactly?"  
  
"You'll sleep. Dreamlessly, I assure you. I can better do my work if you aren't awake to flinch at every pain."  
  
"What did he pay you?"  
  
The witch looked at him for a moment. "He paid me in blood," she said. "It was the price I demanded."  
  
Blood. So there was something inherent in his blood, to explain the control he had over fire. The beast had said the king was more monster than man. Harasawa took the cup she offered him, and drank it all in one swallow.  
  
#  
  
He woke aching and hungry, but able to sit up. Harasawa looked down at his arms and chest, wounds newly healed over, everything seemingly where it belonged. Imayoshi pulled the hide in the door back, looking into the room. "I thought I heard you moving around. Are you hungry?"  
  
Harasawa nodded.  
  
"Good, because while you have yet to get back on your feet, the villagers are quite anxious to be rid of us." He came to sit next to Harasawa, offering him a bowl of something he couldn't and didn't care to identify.  
  
"What did you do?" Harasawa asked.  
  
"Nothing, it's only they had time to look at the monster before they buried it. Your sword has been deemed enchanted, to have cooked it like that. Nobody would touch it, so you're welcome, for the trouble I went to in retrieving it."  
  
"If you had let them bury my sword I would have had you digging it back up yourself."  
  
"I thought you might feel that way." Imayoshi talked while he ate. "They cut the head off the beast, put it on a post out near the road. Apparently they mean for it to ward off any other bad spirits that might attach themselves to this godforsaken place."  
  
"You shouldn't mock them for superstition, given what you can do." Harasawa ate without tasting his food, just trying to fill the hunger. "How long have I been here?"  
  
"Since the witch left? Not yet a full week. She promised you'd be fit to ride when you woke."  
  
"I'm not quite sure I'm fit for walking on my own two feet," Harasawa muttered. He scraped the inside of the bowl with his spoon. "How many healers have you paid in your own blood?"  
  
Imayoshi glanced at him. "If you mean to ask what it is about my blood that might interest them, you wouldn't believe me."  
  
"After everything I've seen you do, there's very little I wouldn't believe. As it is, you seem to know a great deal more about me than I know about you."  
  
"There's a great deal more about you to know," Imayoshi replied. “You have more stories to tell.”

Harasawa eyed him. “If that is in reference to my age—”

“Assuredly not,” Imayoshi said, with a smile that was meant to smooth any ruffled feathers. “I only mean that what you’re asking is not as interesting as you think it is.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe that.” He emptied his bowl, and shook his head. “One day, I’ll find out just what you are, Your Majesty.”

“The witches could tell you, if you’d only ask, but I suppose you have your pride.”

“I’d rather hear it from you.” He set the bowl aside, careful of his movements. “Thank you,” he said. “For all of this.”

Imayoshi shrugged, but didn’t refuse the thanks. “Just promise me one thing, Katchan.”

“What’s that?”

“Stay alive long enough to see me crowned.”

Harasawa smiled. “I will do my best, Your Majesty.” He rubbed his shoulder, looking around for his shirt.

Imayoshi offered it to him. “I had it washed and mended. Can’t have you walking around in bloody rags.”

Harasawa pulled the shirt over his head, trying to work the stiffness out of his arms. “You didn’t pay much for that, I hope.”

“Not after I charmed the lovely young woman who did the work,” Imayoshi replied, with the kind of cocky smirk that almost pulled a laugh out of Harasawa.

“I hope you had your own shirt seen to, then.” He dressed, washed his face in the wooden basin balanced on a chair that had been left for him. “Where are our hosts?”

“Preparing for winter,” Imayoshi said. “Half the village is gone hunting or collecting firewood, the other half are in their gardens.”

“No reason for us to stay and make proper goodbyes?”

“None. I’ll be glad to be rid of this place.” Imayoshi got to his feet. “I’ll ready the horses. I’ve consulted with our host and I think I know where we are—there’s a trail that will take us down to the river, and we won’t need to keep creeping about in the woods like feral dogs.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve found us a ferry.” Imayoshi grinned. “We’ll be all the faster on the water, and without the trouble of avoiding soldiers.”

“I see.” Harasawa pulled on his leather vest, tracing the line where it had been slashed by the beast’s claws, and reached for his sword belt. “And what will we do, when we get where we’re going?”

“Then,” Imayoshi said, “we go back to reclaim what’s mine.”


	9. Bloodlines

Harasawa found he was “fit for riding” only in so much as the effort didn’t kill him. By the time they reached the ferry Imayoshi swore would take them the length of the river, he was miserable, aching and sore, and quite ready to be done with everything.

The ferryman was a little younger than Imayoshi, more nicely dressed than Harasawa expected, speaking to the attendants with him. When he spotted them he jumped back, taking them for bandits. The other men on the ferry reached for what weapons they had, watching the pair of them warily.

That didn’t bother Harasawa quite as much as the fact that Imayoshi immediately called him by name. “Sakurai, it’s been too long!”

The boy blinked at them, and if anything seemed more afraid than he had before. “Your Majesty? They said you were kidnapped and held hostage.” He looked at Harasawa as if he’d forgotten for a moment that he was there, and reached for his sword. Harasawa’s only thought was wondering why a ferryman had to be so well-armed.

“Please don’t, Sakurai,” Imayoshi said cheerfully. “While noble in cause your attempt to liberate me would be at best misguided. We need your help.”

They discussed the need to quickly and quietly reach the coast over a shared meal, while the attendants under Sakurai’s command kept to the ferry, except for one who kept a wary eye on Harasawa.

Sakurai frowned. “I don’t understand. Why does no one know where you are?”

Imayoshi’s smile was thin. “There’s trouble in the bloodline.”

That must have meant something to Sakurai, because his expression changed, and he nodded as if they had come to an understanding. “I can take you, and my men will keep quiet, but I need to know what I’m meant to do, after.”

“I’ll need you to go to our allies,” Imayoshi murmured. “I won’t run through the wilderness like a fugitive, anymore. If my plan does not work in my favor, I will need the aide of my kingdom.”

“It will be war,” Sakurai said.

“Yes, it will.”

The ferry was amply large for the few of them and the pair of horses, with space enough to stable them, and a week’s worth of hay already kept there, in expectation of such passengers. Harasawa saw to the horses as best he could before exhaustion pulled him to the place where they would sleep.

Imayoshi found him sitting on the bed, leaned up against the wall to ease the ache in his bones. He slid in beside him, nuzzling Harasawa’s throat as if he meant to set about an evening of lazy kissing.

Harasawa turned his head away. “What does it mean, ‘trouble in the bloodline’?”

Imayoshi gave him a peevish look for asking questions when they could have busied themselves with other activities. He brushed his lips over Harasawa’s. “The history of Sakurai’s house is a… sordid one. Each generation seems to turn out a plethora of heirs, and yet, if there’s one thing that house is known for, it’s fratricide.” He bent to kiss Harasawa’s throat.

“Brothers and sisters killing each other in pursuit of power, alliances and betrayals, it’s all quite dramatic.” He stopped to pull off his shirt, and straddled Harasawa’s lap. “Trouble in the bloodline is a pretty way of saying ‘kin slaying kin.’ It’s something Sakurai understands quite well—when he’s out here, on this river, it’s exactly because there’s trouble.” Imayoshi chuckled. “Don’t let him fool you. He’s angling for his father’s seat the same as all the others.”

“I’m not sure I find that comforting news,” Harasawa murmured, accepting the kiss that Imayoshi pressed to his mouth.

“He will aide us,” Imayoshi said, “that’s all that matters to me.” He put a hand around Harasawa’s throat, indicating that he was done having conversations. Harasawa’s pulse thrummed under Imayoshi’s thumb, and he sighed into the kiss, his hands sliding up over Imayoshi’s ass, pulling him closer.

“Your Majesty I—I was just leaving, pardon my intrusion—”

Imayoshi looked over his shoulder, apparently undisturbed at having been interrupted even as Harasawa’s hands flew away to a more chaste position on top of the blankets, as far away from Imayoshi as he could place them. “Did you need something, Sakurai?”

Sakurai stood with his back to them, facing up the stairs. “Only to tell you that we’re disembarking, and that we should be at port in no more than a fortnight, if the weather holds.”

“Thank you, Sakurai,” Imayoshi said. “If you could spare the time, you could certainly join us.” Harasawa scowled at Imayoshi and pinched him, hard, to which the prince gave no visible reaction beyond rolling his hips over Harasawa’s, making him keep still.

The back of Sakurai’s neck turned red. Before he could stammer out a reply, Imayoshi said, “I was only teasing, Ryou, you can go.” As Sakurai left, Imayoshi looked at Harasawa with a wicked gleam in his eye. “Are you averse to sharing, Katchan?”

“I’m averse to being shared,” he replied. “You can charm all the seamstresses and ferrymen you like, but I rather have my hands full with you.”

“So you do,” Imayoshi said. “Perhaps you could put those hands to good use for me.”

#

Three days into the river voyage two things had become apparent. Firstly, that Sakurai neither liked, nor trusted Harasawa—and that it was not likely to be an easy journey. The hot days of summer gave way to early rain that made the river rise and go muddy brown.

The ferry was moved by long poles edging the boat down the river, guiding it safely out of the shallows and rocks, using the current to pull them along. The return journey, they told Harasawa, would be twice as difficult, when the river would be swollen with rain and they’d be working against the current. With winter setting it, it would be a risky endeavor.

He was not good for much, on the water, and since he was not inclined to entertain Imayoshi day and night, he spent most of his time with the horses. Perhaps retiring to be a stable master wouldn’t have been so bad. Certainly, it had to be more respectable than sleeping in the same bed as the prince and suffering the glare of a young lord’s son for it every morning.

He was rather concerned that an attempt might be made to push him overboard.

He was still healing, however much the witch had cured the worst of his ills, and he supposed it was better for him to be on board the ferry rather than in the saddle—but the boredom was liable to kill him if he couldn’t find something to do.

To his great fortune, one of the polemen had a store of whiskey he was eager to share, as long as Harasawa was willing to play along with his game of cards—and Harasawa had certainly done more work for a drink.

What Imayoshi did, those days on the ferry, Harasawa couldn’t be sure. He spent a good deal of time with Sakurai, and a good deal of time in bed with Harasawa. Beyond that, Harasawa saw remarkably little of the prince, who seemed to be preparing for their destination alone.

He only wished he knew what it was that they were hoping to find.

#

Buried in the silence in the lower deck, Imayoshi turned in the bed so that he watched the door, his cheek against his arm. Harasawa laid behind him, an arm curled around Imayoshi so that he could grasp his hand, tangle their fingers together. He could have laid like that forever, in that safety. He didn’t seem to hurt so much, with Imayoshi’s back against his chest.

“You’ve been unusually quiet,” Harasawa murmured into Imayoshi’s hair, conscious of the rise and fall of Imayoshi’s breath.

“Hm.” Imayoshi shifted, tightening his grasp on Harasawa’s hand. “I’ve been thinking about my next step.”

Harasawa laid a soft kiss to the back of Imayoshi’s shoulder. “What are you hoping to find?”

He expected Imayoshi to evade the question. “My most powerful ally,” Imayoshi murmured. “If they’ll aide me.” That soft glow flickered under his skin, a burst of warmth radiating from him, almost hot enough to make Harasawa pull away.

He drew Imayoshi closer. “You know I will follow you back.”

He could hear Imayoshi’s smile in his voice. “You said once you’d walk through hell for me, I remember. I’d rather hope I won’t have to ask it of you.”

Harasawa closed his eyes, tucking in to Imayoshi’s shoulder. “I’ll do whatever I have to, to see you safely home.”

#

The river churned against its shore like a tide of bulls stampeding. The rain slicked down as they made port, making footing uncertain. It was all the more difficult to coax the horses off of the ferry, and all the more unpleasant to be leaving it—and its warmth—behind.

They had made port outside of the city, a good distance from where the Thread met the sea. The river bar thundered in the distance, impassible in this kind of weather. Few ships would be coming up from the sea.

Harasawa pulled the hood of his cloak farther over his head, holding the reins of their horses as Imayoshi gave his parting words to Sakurai. He smiled as easily as if they were simply old friends promising to see each other again soon. Imayoshi clapped a hand on Sakurai’s shoulder, bending to murmur something in his ear, and Sakurai nodded.  

Harasawa had the sense he’d had the day he watched Imayoshi’s name day, when he had stood on the castle walls and smiled at the people below. It was the sense that some unseen tide was shifting, rushing in at the world. Things were changing that he did not understand.

Boots sliding in the mud, Imayoshi came up off the river port to join him. “We’ll head a day’s ride west,” Imayoshi said, “that’s as far as we should have to go.”

“What will your friend here do now?” Harasawa asked, nodding at Sakurai as they readied the ferry to pull away again, to begin their battle upriver.

“He’ll head north, to my allies. They won’t raise open rebellion yet, but they will be ready, if it is necessary.” Imayoshi glanced at Harasawa. “You look rather grim-faced.”

“I hoped we could avoid war,” Harasawa said.

“And we may yet. But I’m not fool enough to challenge my father without people who will rise to my aide.”

“And how will they fare, caught between two fires?”

Imayoshi didn’t answer, swinging into the saddle. “Of course, it’s my great hope I won’t need them at all. But I can’t be certain of that.” He turned Tyrant toward the road, and glanced at Harasawa. “Are you coming?”

Harasawa was not content with that, and he knew Imayoshi was not ignorant of that fact. He had seen one war, and been ruined by it. He did not expect to survive a second.

Or even wish to.

The rain kept most people from the road, and those they did pass did not spend overly long glancing at the pair on horseback. They could have been anyone.

The rain faded sometime after noon, the sun lowering over the trees. The air had changed, with a hint of salt to it. Imayoshi was following a route that Harasawa couldn’t make sense of, leading them off the road and into the thin, scraggly trees that thrived that close to the sea.

They traveled that way for some distance, Imayoshi stopping every now and then as if to listen, or to pick up a trail.

Harasawa’s patience was wearing, not knowing what or who they were looking for. Perhaps it would have been better to ask the witch exactly what it was he was traveling with, that wore the prince’s name and face. Then he might have some idea, instead of uselessly trailing after Imayoshi, hoping they weren’t about to wander into danger.

_More monster than man._ He could not quite shake that accusation from his head, not when he remembered the way Imayoshi’s eyes had glinted in the firelight, like a hawk spying its prey.

He remembered, too, the way that Imayoshi had regarded the beast after he had killed it, the way he had regarded the men that had attacked them on the road when first they left the castle. He had given them the notice a well-fed cat might give to an already dead mouse that no longer interested it.

This was his prince, his future king.

Harasawa was beginning to wonder if he should fear him a little more.

The creak of snapping wood was all the warning Harasawa had that something else was there with them.

He reached for his sword and it surged out from the trees, a blur of smoke and dull black scales, encircling the pair of them with a growl that made the air hum. Harasawa jerked the reins, pulling himself between Imayoshi and the beast’s head, trying to make sense of what he saw.

Body no larger than a horse but too long, with the neck and tail of a serpent, black as iron, smoke seething from between its teeth. Cold gray eyes assessed Harasawa as it growled again, wings canopying over them, as if to block out the sky.

He was staring into the face of a dragon.

The smoke disappeared as it sucked in a breath, a rumbling beginning deep in its chest, a red glow forming behind its teeth.

He heard Imayoshi’s voice. “Suzume!” Tyrant slammed into Ranger, Imayoshi forced Harasawa out of the way.

The thought that seized Harasawa, strange as it was, was how Tyrant did not flinch. Twice, the horse had surprised him. Once, in thunder and lightning—and now, staring down the maw of a dragon.

“Suzume, it’s me!”

The dragon stopped, raised its head. It looked at Imayoshi for a long moment, and uncoiled. The body of the dragon dissolved, brushed away by the wind as if it were only sand, and left a girl standing in its wake, no more than sixteen, dressed in black.

Suzume. Harasawa knew that name, as surely as he knew Imayoshi’s—this was Imayoshi’s younger sister. The princess was supposed to have died, some six years before, in the same fever that took the queen. The whole kingdom had mourned them, banners lowered out of respect.

Imayoshi dropped out of the saddle, embracing her. The girl did not return the hug, watching Harasawa over his shoulder, with that same hunter-stare.

Harasawa had never seen the princess from anything but a distance, but he saw it clear enough now—she and her brother had the same eyes.

Imayoshi stepped back, giving her the most sincere smile Harasawa had ever seen him wear. “It’s good to see you again.” He gripped her shoulders as if he was convinced she might slip away.

“You shouldn’t be here.” She gave him no smile, no greeting. “If you’re here then Father will find—”

“That’s why I’m here,” Imayoshi said. “Father wants me dead.”

She gazed at him, confusion and suspicion flickering across her face, and then—understanding. “You made the change?”

“Ah—” Harasawa looked between them. “Your Majesty, I’ve spent most of this journey not knowing quite what’s going on but—this,”

Suzume turned her gaze on him once more, her suspicion flaring back to life. “Who is this, Shouichi?”

“Katchan,” Imayoshi said, almost beaming. “This is my sister.”

“The dragon, yes, I’ve figured that one out.” Harasawa looked at Imayoshi, feeling the last of his certainty slipping away. He cursed, rubbing his face. “My God. You’re a fucking dragon.”

Imayoshi grinned. “I wondered when you’d figure it out, Katchan.”

#

Suzume led them to a little house on the rocks, a full day’s ride from any city or village. She rode in the saddle behind Imayoshi, glancing back every now and then at Harasawa. Brother and sister spoke in hushed whispers, and all Harasawa knew was that the world had been pulled out from under him.

Prince, princess, king of the realm—it wasn’t mere magic that explained that fire. Not witch fire that had taken the Traitor’s ranks. Not sorcery that gave Imayoshi the ability to set fire to whatever he pleased and cauterize a wound. The royal family was filled with dragons.

A woman stepped out of the door of the house, and even from a distance, even in the simple dress she wore, Harasawa knew her for the queen. Alive, well, six years since she was supposed to have died. She waited there, and Imayoshi went to her as excitedly as he’d gone to his sister, though he didn’t hug her. He stood before her, waiting for her approval, and like a sharp kick Harasawa remembered how young he was.

Younger than when Harasawa went to war. Younger, though only slightly, than when he was knighted.

The queen extended her hand, reaching up to brush Imayoshi’s hair out of his eyes. “Hello, Shouichi,” she murmured. “You’ve gotten tall.”

Harasawa dismounted, and her eyes fell on him. “You’re the man who pulled my husband out of the river.”

Harasawa hadn’t expected to be recognized. He bowed carefully, lowering his gaze. “Your Majesty.”

“Stand. If my son is here, then that means there must be trouble.” She turned back to the door, gesturing her children inside. Harasawa took the horses, leading them behind the house to tie them. His hands were shaking.

Dragons had not troubled their kingdom in hundreds of years. It had been credited to the dragonslayers of the old days, but now, he thought, it may have been because the territory was already taken.

How did a dragon walk in human skin? How did they keep it all a secret, how many people knew?

“Katchan.”

Harasawa looked up. Imayoshi stood in the back door, in his worn wool shirt, watching Harasawa with a hand on the door. “You seem a bit shaken.”

Harasawa laughed. “I am.” He stared at Imayoshi, not sure of the words that came to him. “All this time—I thought, sorcery, something like that. Never this.”

The queen appeared behind Imayoshi, looking Harasawa up and down with a new, more scrutinizing eye. “Any mortal man who tries to bend fire to his will dies, consumed in flames. Only dragons can control the fire without burning.” She looked between her son and him. “You trust this man?” she asked Imayoshi.

“Yes, I do.”

“Then tell him to come inside. We have few enough people we can trust in this world.”

Harasawa did his best to steady his hands. He stepped up to the door with Imayoshi, lowering his voice. “Is Her Majesty also…”

“Hm? Oh, no. She’s as human as you are.” Imayoshi was watching Harasawa’s face. “Did you really have no idea?”

“I don’t take it for granted that every person I see may not actually be human,” Harasawa answered. He kept his gaze down—he had reverted already to the courtesies that had been so well trained into him as a boy. “I don’t—I don’t understand, Your Majesty.”

Something in Imayoshi’s expression shifted, though Harasawa only saw it from the edges of his gaze. “I preferred it when you only called me that when we were alone.”

Harasawa looked up, but Imayoshi had already turned away, leading him back into the house. The light was dim, the house lit and warmed by a pit of coals. Suzume sat on one side, to the left of her mother. Imayoshi took the seat at her right, and so Harasawa settled directly across from the queen, watching the smoldering of the coals.

She spoke first to Imayoshi. “If you are here, then you must have been able to make the change.”

Imayoshi’s answer was more hesitant. “In a way.”

The silence was heavy. “How do you mean?” his mother asked.

“I can—partially change.”

“What is the change?” The question was past Harasawa’s lips before he could stop it, and without looking at the queen’s face, he could sense the reproachful shift in her expression. “Apologies for the interruption, Your Majesty,” he said.

“You’ve traveled all this way and he knows nothing?”

“It was not necessary for him to know.”

“Yet you claim to trust him.”

Harasawa watched Imayoshi’s hands curl into fists, and the release. Imayoshi was the one who answered his question. “The change is the process by which a dragon takes another shape. Not everyone can do it, some dragons born in a human shape are trapped that way forever. Over time what abilities they do have atrophy, and by the time they die there’s little to distinguish them from any other person except their blood.”

Harasawa took all this in silence, understanding little of it. “So—the king. You. The princess. All dragons.”

Imayoshi nodded. “It is a change we took on many generations ago, to avoid those who hunted us. It’s incredible, how much more you can accomplish when people think you’re an ordinary man.”

“No one would ever mistake you for an ordinary man, Your Majesty.” Harasawa didn’t mean it as flattery so much as fact.

The corners of Imayoshi’s mouth pulled up. “It was thought that I couldn’t make the shift. I’d never shown any inclination to it, so I wasn’t a threat, but…” Imayoshi’s hands curled and released once more. “Three days before my name day I made a partial shift. It’s a horribly unflattering sight, I’ll tell you, but it proved I had the possibility to achieve it.”

“What do you mean, ‘you weren’t a threat’?”

The queen spoke, then. “Suzume could change from a young age. I did not know, then, what it meant, until the first attempt was made on her life.” She stared at Harasawa with the gravity of a woman who would cut his heart out if she felt it was needed. “It is the instinct of any creature who comes to realize it has competition to eliminate that competition, even if it comes from within their own nest.”

Suzume’s voice was soft. “Father has given over too much of himself his dragon shape. He will eat us to protect his own territory.”

“Your mind changes, when you shed your human shape,” Imayoshi said. “The change in itself isn’t that bad, but it’s the stress of the shift that sometimes breaks a dragon, and they become like beasts.”

_He will eat us to protect his own territory._ Harasawa let out a breath, his head spinning.

“So I took my daughter and came here,” the queen said. “So long as my husband does not know where she is he will assume she has found territory of her own, or died. Either way, she is of no threat to him, here.” She turned to address her son.

“It is good that you have come here,” she said. “Your sister and I will need the extra help. I can tell that this winter will be hard, it—”

“Mother,” Imayoshi interrupted as softly as he could, “I haven’t come here to hide.”

That silence again, weighty, as they assessed each other. “What do you mean to do, then? Your father will kill you if he finds you, unless he becomes satisfied that you won’t return.”

“I will return,” Imayoshi said. “I mean to challenge him for the throne. I—I had hoped that Suzume would come with me.”

If her children were creatures of fire, the queen’s own voice was much closer to ice. Harasawa was almost surprised that the coldness in her voice didn’t extinguish the coals. “You’d endanger your sister’s life for a crown? Do you think I have lived in hiding all these years so you can take her back there to be killed?”

Harasawa glanced at Suzume. She watched the coals, her hands pressed over her knees. She spotted him looking and glared at him, grey eyes catching the firelight in a way that was too reminiscent of her mother. Harasawa looked away.

“If we succeeded you would not have to live in hiding,” Imayoshi said. “You would be restored to your title, your honored standing in the kingdom.”

“And if you fail, my children will be dead.” She swept a dusting of ash back into the fire pit. “It is not a gamble I am willing to make, and you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting it. If you wish to challenge your father, so be it, I cannot stop you—but you will leave your sister out of it.” She rose to her feet.

“Mother—”

“I will not discuss this with you again.”

She left them sitting in an admonished silence. Imayoshi looked almost stunned. Suzume was gazing at him as if she wanted to say something, but would not so long as Harasawa was there. He quietly excused himself, and went back out into the cold with the excuse of tending to their horses, though there was little enough that they needed. The horses grazed on the tough grass, and Harasawa stood out on the back step, trying to get a sense of things once more.

“Do you have children, sir?”

The queen’s voice startled him, and he was careful to bow before he answered. “Two, Your Majesty. A daughter and a son, though a little younger than yours.”

Harasawa had the sense that she was taking his measure, guessing what he was worth. “You can’t know what it is, to hold your child and know that it’s something not entirely human. Something that may well be monstrous.” She turned her gaze away from him. “I have no magical ability, nor am I dragonborn, but I will do whatever I must to protect them.”

Harasawa wasn’t sure what he was meant to say to that. Nor was he sure what compelled him to say what he did. “I didn’t hold my children, when I was with them.” He watched the horses, because it was easier than looking at the queen, and seeing her expression. He hadn’t looked at his children, either. “I’d already failed them.” She remembered that he’d pulled the king from the river. She must have remembered the other stories, too.

“If you left your children behind, I would say you did fail them, at least in that respect.” She let her words fall through the air a moment. “But perhaps,” she said more slowly, “you know enough now, that you will not fail my son.”  She smoothed the sleeve of her dress, lifted her chin. “It’s not the wound that makes a man hero or coward, sir. It is how he answers to it.”

#

They had an uneasy supper, in which Imayoshi recounted much of their journey, occasionally prompting Harasawa to speak, to fill in a detail or confirm a remark. One might never have known from the way he told the story that they had been fleeing as fugitives. It was a very convincing façade, but Harasawa had become better acquainted with the subtleties of Imayoshi’s moods, and of the currents that flowed under the surface. All was not well.

Harasawa found Imayoshi sitting out on the rocks afterward, watching the waves roll in. The wind had a chill to it, hinting at the end of summer. “It wasn’t an unreasonable hope,” Harasawa told him. “You said she was your most powerful ally.”

Imayoshi smiled a little, gestured Harasawa to sit next to him. “We’ll stay here a few days yet,” he said, laying his hand over Harasawa’s. “To rest, some. It won’t help at all if we’re exhausted when we face my father.”

“You still mean to challenge him?”

Imayoshi nodded. “I won’t hide and wait for him to die.”

“Are you certain you’ll be able to—make the change, to threaten him?”

“No. But I couldn’t respect myself if I hid.” He lifted his hand, bringing it to Harasawa’s back, tracing the scar through his shirt. He leaned over, as if to kiss him, and murmured, “I will not miss victory day.”


	10. The Lady on the River

It was an uncomfortable few days they spent in that house, at least on Harasawa’s part. He did his best to busy himself outside, but it did not keep the shrewd eyes of the queen and her daughter off him. He was mindful of his courtesies to each, keeping well out of their way and doing whatever was asked of him.

Imayoshi found it all quite amusing. “You argue with me.” He was sitting on the back step of the house, polishing his boots. Harasawa was busied hauling water from the stream, for the house and for the horses.

“You tasked me with defending your life, Your Majesty, our relationship is somewhat different.”

“More than somewhat, I’d say.” Imayoshi put his arms across his knees. “You’ve been remarkably quiet since I told you I still plan to go back.”

Harasawa held a bucket for each of the horses, letting them drink. “It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?” He still didn’t know quite what he thought of everything. “Back into the serpent’s nest for us.”

“I think I should be offended by that remark.”

Harasawa smiled a little. “How do you suppose we’ll get back without being killed?”

“That’s what Sakurai is for,” Imayoshi murmured. “By the time we’re up the river my allies will be gathering.”

“Won’t that draw the notice of your father?”

“Almost certainly. But even he isn’t mad enough to begin a civil war without reason. He’ll be watching.”

“And that leaves us to slip past his watch.”

“So it does.” Imayoshi looked thoughtful. “We need only reach Momoi. We passed near her estate on our journey here. That’s where Sakurai would go first.”

Of Lady Momoi, there were certainly stories, of which Harasawa had heard a few. “How many of your allies know about… your particular lineage?”

Imayoshi seemed amused by the question. “Well naturally some women of my family have before married out among the other noble houses and that can lead to certain complications in maintaining a family secret. Each house will have its own explanations for such children. Some will take it as a blessing, some a curse… for whatever reason, few of them are ever able to make the change. I imagine many of them were simply never taught or told what they were, to protect them.”

Harasawa caught the reticence lingering at the edge of Imayoshi’s voice. “What about those who did?”

Imayoshi pulled on his boots. “They were eaten.”

#

It was difficult to sleep in that house, perhaps because it was so quiet. Harasawa was restless enough that he woke Imayoshi. Imayoshi seemed almost to shake off sleep, pushing Harasawa back into the blankets and straddling his hips. “If you keep tossing and turning like that you’ll wake the whole house,” Imayoshi murmured against his throat. “Better to work off some of that nervous energy, don’t you think?”

Harasawa wanted to ask why they weren’t planning more, or if Imayoshi already had a plan, why wasn’t he talking about it—but more than that he wanted to believe for a moment that all of this wasn’t happening. That they were just two men, not about to place themselves in open rebellion against the king, that this wasn’t likely to result in both of them dying.

He traced his thumb over the new scar in Imayoshi’s side. He’d already failed Imayoshi once. He didn’t mean to do it again.

He rolled, put Imayoshi on his back. He fumbled for the bottle of oil that Imayoshi had noticeably left in the open and within reach. “Your Majesty,” he murmured, “I just want to ask you one thing.”

Imayoshi pushed Harasawa’s hair back from his face. “And what was that, Katchan?”

“After all this—after you’re crowned—” He was not going to speak as if there was any chance of failure. “What then?” He slicked his fingers, slid his hand between them to press into Imayoshi. He had the satisfaction of hearing Imayoshi’s breath catch, just a little.

“Mm—I’m not quite sure what you mean, Katchan.” He leaned up for a kiss, testing his teeth on Harasawa’s lip. Harasawa worked slowly, relaxing Imayoshi.

“I mean,” he said, “will you be done with me when you have that crown on your head?”

Imayoshi couldn’t resist the sting. “Would you miss me, if I was?”

Harasawa removed his fingers rather more swiftly than necessary, gaining an almost-whine from Imayoshi. “Katchan, there’s no need to be like that.”

Harasawa waited, and Imayoshi sighed, pulling him down to kiss him again. “You yet interest me too much for that, Katsunori.” His eyes glimmered. “I could make you captain of my guard.”

“I would rather you kill me,” Harasawa replied, easing back into Imayoshi. “I’ve had enough excitement to last me a lifetime.”

“Personal attendant, then,” Imayoshi said, tracing his fingers over Harasawa’s throat. “I’d be a fool to cast off someone as loyal as you.”

Harasawa didn’t quite know how to answer to that.

“Now if you’d be kind enough,” Imayoshi said, “get on your back, Katchan.”

Harasawa obliged, letting Imayoshi climb atop him. Imayoshi stretched out over him, slow as honey and all too pleased with himself. Harasawa’s hand pressed into the small of his back, anchored there. Imayoshi pressed a hand over his mouth, smiling at him through the dark. “Remember to keep quiet, Katchan.”

Imayoshi was by no means eager to be done with Harasawa. Every time he was close to finishing Imayoshi backed off, stopped, until in whispers Harasawa was begging him, “Your Majesty—Shou—please.”

Imayoshi had a handful of Harasawa’s hair, bent so far over him Harasawa couldn’t have looked at anything else if he wanted to. He finished with a choked sound, buried under Imayoshi’s hand. Imayoshi smiled at him, waiting as Harasawa went slack beneath him. Harasawa had to lay there a while, catching his breath.

Imayoshi stroked his cheek with a thumb, still bent over him. “I hope you’re not going to fall asleep on me, just yet.”

Harasawa ran a hand down his side. “Of course not, Your Majesty.”

#

He woke sometime near dawn, Imayoshi pulled tight against his chest. He hardly dared to move, not wanting to wake him. His arm ached from being held so long in one place, so he carefully released his hold on Imayoshi and extended his arm, working some life back into. Stirring in his sleep Imayoshi pulled the blankets higher—though he couldn’t have been cold, for all the heat he was giving off—and curled away, not in a hurry to wake.

Harasawa looked at his palm, opening and closing his hand. Even in the dim light he could see the ugly scar that had formed across his palm, from the blade of his own sword. His hands were a little stiffer, now, though he could still do what he needed to do.

Not many survived what he’d survived. Not many knights lived as long as he did.

He was getting old. He _was_ old. Not as fast as he’d once been, not as strong. A wise man would have been keeping money, so that he could someday retire on it.

Harasawa had been drinking his. He had always planned to die doing this. Or not always, but since the war. He hadn’t expected to make it this long.

“Live long enough to see me crowned.” And then what? What was he to do after that? He wouldn't be a fit companion for a king. He may well be consigned to playing guard for merchants until he was killed doing it.

He had no reason to survive what they were about to do.

He laid there for a while, dozing off before he woke in the cold, Imayoshi having gotten up and dressed.

Harasawa dressed and wandered carefully through the house, which was still eerily quiet. The queen knelt in front of the fire, heating water. She cast Harasawa a slight glance when he bowed, greeting her. “My children are out in the forest, if you are looking for Shouichi.” She stood, her back to him. “They will return, in due time.”

A quiet order not to go looking for them. Harasawa bowed his head. “Of course, Your Majesty. Is there anything I can do in the meantime?”

Her gaze was cool, evaluating him. “Whatever happens in this scheme you’re indulging my son in, keep the secret. No matter what may befall you, do not let the truth be revealed. Do you understand?”

Harasawa nodded. “I understand, Your Majesty.”

“In the meantime, our firewood stores are yet low.” She warmed her hands over the fire. “Suzume will never be affected by the cold, but I am not so blessed.”

Harasawa nodded and excused himself. Better to keep himself busy, he thought, than to dwell too long on the end of their stay.

He worked through most of the morning with the saw and axe before Imayoshi and his sister returned. They came on foot, the smell of smoke following them. Harasawa glanced up, and Imayoshi offered him a smile, but his knuckles were white. Suzume cast him a glance and wordlessly swept past him to the house.

Imayoshi took the axe from Harasawa and slammed it into the log he had been preparing to split. Harasawa stepped back, watching as Imayoshi worked, splitting logs with more force than needed. At length he laid the axe down, and sat on the splitting log, looking at his hands, where blisters were already rising.

Harasawa crouched, inspecting his hands. “You aren’t used to this kind of work,” he said. “It’d be best to bandage your hands.”

Imayoshi made a noncommittal sound. “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

Harasawa looked up. “What?”

“Don’t act as if you didn’t hear me, Katsunori. It doesn’t suit you.” Imayoshi stood, hands hanging at his sides. “We’ve been here long enough.” He shouldered past Harasawa, leaving him to collect the split wood, wondering how well-prepared they truly were.

#

Imayoshi spoke little for the rest of the day, and less in the morning as they prepared to depart. His mother came out to watch them as they saddled the horses. Suzume stood at her side a moment and then disappeared once more into the house. Harasawa hadn’t heard her speak since the day they arrived, and he wondered now if she meant to say goodbye to her brother.

Imayoshi stood a step below his mother—and still taller than her—murmuring his goodbye. He bent his head, and she left a kiss in his hair, wishing him well.

Their departure was made in silence. Imayoshi’s thoughts were elsewhere, and Harasawa supposed it was better not to intrude on whatever it was that occupied his attention. It wasn’t the silence that concerned him as much as the absence of Imayoshi’s usual smirk.

Tyrant seemed to be in more of a foul mood than usual, so Harasawa rode well ahead of Imayoshi, scouting their path. The soft ground was not kind to Ranger, used to the mountains as he was, but they made good time, keeping well away from the road.

They made camp in a hollow against the back of a hill, out of sight of both river and road, where they would be able to keep a fire without being disturbed.

It was strange, being alone in the forest again. Strange to think that it wouldn’t last.

Imayoshi had just settled in by the fire when he looked up, scanning the trees. He rose, walking to the edge of their camp, something dangerously like a scowl crossing his face. He didn’t raise his voice. “I know you’re out there.”

Silent as a snake over leaves the long black dragon that was Suzume slid out of the shadows, crouching in the firelight and staring at her brother. If there was an expression to be read in a dragon’s face, Harasawa couldn’t make it out, but he understood well enough the cold edge to Imayoshi’s voice. “What are you doing here?”

Harasawa had not gotten a very good look at Suzume the last time he saw her in that shape, but he saw now that a crest, almost like a bird’s lay against her head, and at Imayoshi’s question it flared, and she hissed. Harasawa heard her voice, but as if it was whispered through the leaves of the trees. “You need me.”

“Mother was right, I can’t risk your life for my gains. Go home.”

Imayoshi turned his back on her, and Suzume’s crest flared again. Before Harasawa could shout to warn Imayoshi she lunged, knocking him on his back with a swipe of her claws. She slammed her forelegs on either side of Imayoshi, growling into his face. “You will _die_ without me.”

Imayoshi stared up at her from the ground, her teeth bared. She spoke again, her voice everywhere and nowhere. “You can’t make me go back.”

They seemed at a stalemate for a moment, and then Imayoshi looked away from her. “Stay then. But there’s nowhere for you to sleep.”

She snorted, almost like a laugh, crest relaxing. She pulled away, and dissolved once more into the girl, brushing her hair away from her face as she stepped back from her brother.

Imayoshi got to his feet, dusting his clothes with his bandaged hands. “When did you come after us?”

“After sundown.”

Harasawa looked at her incredulously, and she glanced away. “I can cover more distance in the air than you can on the ground. No one sees me in the dark.” She sat by the fire, closed her eyes.

Harasawa glanced at Imayoshi, who shrugged. Harasawa nodded toward Suzume. “Having her here will lower the chances anyone takes notice of us.”

“Perhaps. I don’t imagine squires often travel with their sisters.”

“No,” Harasawa allowed, “that story will no longer help us.”

Suzume spoke. “Say he was a sworn man to our father, who recently passed. It has the benefit of being half true.”

“Who are we to say our father was, if someone asks?”

“A merchant,” Harasawa said, “we’ll say he had a house in the south, while the main family house is in the north. That gives us an excuse to be traveling.”

“If anyone asks how our father died I’ll just start to cry,” Suzume added, “that will keep anyone from asking too many questions.” She tucked her chin into her knees. Almost to herself, she muttered, “I mean to eat his heart.”

She stayed sat by the fire while Harasawa and Imayoshi tended to their camp, and Harasawa could not say if she slept or not.

He volunteered for first watch, and Imayoshi said, “Don’t bother. Either I or Suzume will hear anything that’s coming a mile off.” Harasawa settled into his bedroll and Imayoshi slid over, nesting into Harasawa’s side. “Your Majesty,” he murmured.

“Shh, she knows.” Imayoshi was not to be moved. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we get back on the road.”

#

When they woke in the early hours of the morning, Suzume was crouched next to the fire, turning a spit with what looked to Harasawa to be a leg of deer. He looked at the roasting meat, looked around at their camp where there did not appear to be the rest of the deer, and looked to Suzume. She glanced at him, smirked, and nodded at Imayoshi. “Wake him up.”

Imayoshi yawned, shook his head, and glanced at the fire. “Is that all you left for us?”

“It’s more than you’ll need. Eat all you can, after that I’ll finish it off.” She swept her skirts away from the coals, her hair knotted behind her head.

“When did you learn to cook?” Imayoshi asked.

“When I had to.” She inspected the meat. “Amazing what you can learn when you get tired of burning everything or eating it raw.” She took a knife from some hidden fold in her skirts and cut away a piece of meat, handing it to her brother. “Go on. Can’t have you living on bread and cheese now, can we?”

“Is your theory that I don’t eat enough meat?”

“My theory is that when you fully make the change you’re not going to know anything about hunting.”

“Lucky for me, then, I have the girl who singlehandedly devastated the coastal population of deer.”

Suzume punched him in the arm, and Harasawa left them to see that the horses were watered. He was uneasy with all this. He did not count Imayoshi to be rash—the lack of planning that had gone into their first departure was one of necessity—but this felt different. It was as if Imayoshi thought he was running out of time.

They ate, and buried the fire. Suzume rode with Imayoshi—if she was too close to Ranger, they had learned, the horse would panic and try to bolt. “They can smell it on me,” Suzume said. What ‘it’ was, she didn’t care to elaborate.

The road followed the river from the hillside, winding through the brush and trees. Ferries passed on by below them, and occasionally they passed other travelers, who seldom spared them a second glance.

Imayoshi had put on one of the tunics he had brought from the castle, black to match Suzume, and to better lend to their story of a recently passed father.

Near noontime they came on a fairly large village where they stopped to sup, and rest the horses. True to her word, when the well-meaning man who sold them roasted cuts of beef asked how their father had passed, Suzume burst into tears so convincing that for a moment Harasawa wondered if he really had died. Imayoshi made a show of taking her away to comfort her, leaving Harasawa to pay the man and make up a story about an injury that had led to a fatal fever.

They saw some soldiers, but nowhere near as many as he would have expected. He was more unsettled by their thin ranks than by their presence. “Just a few weeks ago there were soldiers crawling over every village along the Thread,” Harasawa said, glancing at the man. “Now I only see a handful—do you know what happened? Did they find the prince?”  

The man shook his head. “Far as I know they’re talking of giving the prince up for dead. Said no ransom had come up for him. Doesn’t make any sense, though, does it?”

“None,” Harasawa agreed, catching the scent of rumor.

“You ask me,” the man said, “the prince wasn’t abducted at all.”

“Oh,” Harasawa said, “what makes you say that?”

“What one man could walk into the castle and run out with the only prince, ah?” He shook his head. “No, I think the prince is taking the example of some of them other lords’ sons what go around killing their own brothers and fathers and got caught before he could finish the job, but the king’d rather not everybody think he’s been betrayed by his own son. It’s never just one branch that blights on the tree.”

“Do you think the king suspects rebellion?” Harasawa asked.

“Maybe. It would explain why the soldiers are gone, wouldn’t it?” The man shrugged. “I’ve heard no news of war yet, and better it stay that way. Princes can kill kings, as long as it doesn’t come pouring down on the rest of us, yeah?”

Harasawa nodded, made some polite end to their conversation. Imayoshi glanced up as he rejoined them. “What is it?”

“We’ll speak of it when we leave,” Harasawa said. “Getting where we’re going may be more difficult than we thought.”

They didn’t linger over-long in the village, striking back onto the road with most of the day still before them.

They did not go hungry, those days on the road. Every now and then Harasawa would look up, and find Suzume missing, and she might return an hour or three later, never with a whole deer, only parts, rubbing a fleck of blood from the corner of her mouth.

Imayoshi’s smile never wavered, but he had grown quieter. He spoke little to Suzume, and less to Harasawa. Whatever splinter had gotten under his skin at his mother’s house, it worked deeper now, and Imayoshi kept his concern to himself. If Suzume had any ideas about the matter, she didn’t share them, and Harasawa didn’t ask.

The weather had turned miserable, pulling them into autumn. Suzume had no cloak, and said she didn’t need one—but Harasawa insisted she take his. “If we’re seen on the road it’ll be me they curse for letting you go cold.” It was much too long for her, and she made no effort to hide her annoyance at wearing it, but it kept her out of the rain. Harasawa risked the chill, until they happened upon a farmhouse where they bartered venison for a proper cloak, telling the concerned widow that Suzume had lost hers when she had fallen into the river.  

For the gift of the venison—which this time, was most of the animal—they were able to secure a night’s sleep at the widow’s hearth. It warmed them, gave their clothes a chance to dry, and with thanks to the woman of the house they were soon out into the rain once more.

The rain had eased when some days upriver they found where a tributary joined the Thread. “Up that way,” Imayoshi said, “that’s where her hall is.”

“And how likely that this route is being watched?”

Suzume spoke up. “I don’t smell anyone, but the rain may have dampened things. If we camp here, tonight, I’ll fly over in the dark, and see if there are any fires.”

“How long will that take you?” Harasawa asked.

“An hour, at most. I’ll be back well before dawn.”

Imayoshi nodded. “Let’s try to find a dry place to camp, then.”

Harasawa took first watch that night, unsatisfied with Imayoshi’s assurances that they would hear anything that was coming. This river was narrower, faster, and thus made more noise.

He pulled his cloak tight, watching the forest as the sky darkened. Imayoshi didn’t make his usual attempts at distracting or otherwise mildly irritating Harasawa. He paced around their fire as Suzume stood on the rocks over riverbank, barely visible in the dark. For a moment she seemed to disappear, then with a sweep of cool air her long black wings rose into the sky, and fully changed she leapt out over the river, carrying up into the night.

She vanished, and the silence she left behind settled heavily over their camp.

Harasawa glanced at Imayoshi. “You’ve been quiet.”

“Have I?”

Harasawa wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say after that. He wasn’t good at this sort of thing. “Why are you rushing back so quickly to face your father? There would have been time, to wait, to… develop the abilities you need.”

The fire cracked much louder than it had a moment before. He couldn’t hear Imayoshi doing anything, and he supposed it was better not to look. “If I wait too long,” he said, “then the world will change. My allies will forget about me, will find new people to share their ambitions with. If I lose my throne, I lose them.”

Harasawa looked over his shoulder at Imayoshi. He knew so little about his prince, really. He’d been playing according to the prince’s rules ever since they left. He’d given nearly his whole life story to Imayoshi—and what the prince had given him in return was stories about other people. He hardly spoke about himself.

Suzume returned, landing on the rocks and sending several tumbling into the river. Her dragon form melting away she climbed to their camp. “Three camps of royal soldiers,” she said, “hidden along the river. We will have to take a long route around.”

“Not necessarily,” Imayoshi said.

#

“I don’t like this,” Harasawa said, holding onto the reins of the horses.

“You were fine with her flying over the heads of royal soldiers.”

“This is different.” Harasawa muttered. “This is—”

“The fastest way in.”

“—the most reckless thing you could have come up with, and I don’t consider you to be reckless.”

Imayoshi laughed. “You don’t know what Momoi can do.”

“I’ve heard enough stories,” he muttered, “about the lady who dabbles in witchcraft and has the Sight. Shouldn’t she have been able to tell that you were coming?”

“Our kind are outside of her sight.” Imayoshi watched up the river, though if he could see anything Harasawa had no idea. “I trust her completely. She is one of the few people in the kingdom who knows what we are.” He smiled. “Here she comes now.”

The sound of oars dipping into water eventually reached Harasawa, and the light of the lanterns that hung on the boat illuminated the young woman who stood at the center with Suzume. Imayoshi picked up a torch, whispering a spark to life and holding it alight, showing the ferry where they were.

“Imagine my surprise,” Momoi said as her attendants pushed the ferry closer to shore, “when a girl I thought had died six years ago found her way into my private chambers.” She smiled, pulling Imayoshi into a hug when he stepped onto the boat. “I’m so glad to see you’re safe.” Imayoshi pressed a kiss to her cheek, and she giggled.

“Enough of that now,” she murmured, “get the horses on, and we’ll get the three of you out of sight.”

It was not so big a ferry that there was any real standing room below the deck. Harasawa was not sure what they were meant to do with the horses, but it seemed that had already been thought of. Murmuring to them, Momoi led the horses below, and they laid down and slept like puppies. She rose once more, gesturing the three of them into the back of the ferry, to sit low under the wall. “You mustn’t make a sound,” she said. “I can get us past the camps unseen, but not unheard.” She left them sitting there, and made a round on the ferry, putting out the lamps one by one.

“How can we get up the river without any light?” Harasawa whispered.

Imayoshi settled in as if to sleep. “Just trust her.”

Immersed in the dark, all Harasawa could do was listen to the soft footsteps on the deck, the oars dipping into the water. He could not see what was happening, but he knew the sounds of a soldiers’ camp when they passed by it. He could smell the campfire smoke. The footsteps on the deck stopped. The oars slid into the river, rose, fell again.

No sound of alarm went up. No shout that anyone had seen them. The sounds of the camp fell away, the footsteps started once again, and Harasawa breathed more easily. “How many camps was it?” he asked softly.

“Three.” Imayoshi answered. “So you only need to hold your breath as if you’re underwater twice more.”

It was a long journey, and late into the night, and Harasawa must have dozed—however uneasily—because he woke when the lanterns lighted once more, the ferry under the soft gold glow. Imayoshi stood talking in a low voice with Momoi, and Suzume was dead asleep, wrapped in her cloak.

A bump told Harasawa the ferry had found its dock, and he got to his feet, looking up at the castle. In the dark, it wasn’t much, but Momoi’s family was nearly as old and influential as Imayoshi’s, and the scale of the hall that was the center of their seat reflected that nobility. Harasawa had been there only once before, when he was still a squire.

“Everyone will be awake by now,” Momoi said, “they’re all very anxious to see you, Shou-chan.”

“Who is _everyone?”_ Harasawa asked.

Momoi looked at him, her smile not quite enough to convince him of her affability. One did not have to be a dragon to be dangerous. “Those of us who can raise soldiers if we must.” She raised a lantern, stepping onto the dock, and gesturing them to follow her. “Wake Suzume. She’ll never forgive me if she sleeps through this.”

Suzume woke at the sound of her name, rising and jumping to the dock. Harasawa glanced back. “My Lady, the horses—”

“Will be properly cared for, I assure you. Come now, there’s some curiosity about you as well, sir.” Her eyes glimmered, and she turned to lead them inside.


	11. The Garden

Harasawa’s first impression of the room was the brightness of the lanterns. The halls had been dark, and it seemed almost daylight within that room. They were the same lanterns that Momoi hung from her ferry—they contained no flame, as far as he could tell, but were lit by some other means.

It was an oddly cozy room, with a circle of chairs around an intricately woven rug that Harasawa realized, after a moment, was a map of the kingdom. Long dark windows stood at the far side of the room, the glass depicting scenes that must have been from the family’s history, though Harasawa couldn’t have said exactly what it was they portrayed.

After that, he noticed the people. Sakurai glowered at him from the hearthside, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Beside him, Harasawa recognized Susa, but beyond the pair of them, he knew none of their faces.

They were all young. Imayoshi’s age, or younger. When had so many young men become lords?

Every eye in the room was on Imayoshi and Suzume, relieved and surprised. “Suzume,” Susa said, eyes widening. “I thought—”

“You were supposed to think that.” She looked at Imayoshi, diverting the stares of the others. “So, Shouichi,” she said, “what are we here to do?”

“Let me sit down at least,” Imayoshi said, smiling. “We’ve come a long way.” He went to the fire as if to warm up. Harasawa wondered how he hadn’t noticed—in front of a fire, Imayoshi always did the same pantomime. He play-acted at being cold.

“Imayoshi—what happened?”

Did everyone call Imayoshi by his name?

“I’ll happily tell you, Kiyoshi, if you let me warm up.” He rubbed his hands, smiled at the people around him. “I knew your lines of communication were swift, Sakurai, but I did not realize how fast.”

“I considered it urgent, Your Majesty.”

“I’m glad you did. I’m happy to see all of you.” Imayoshi turned to them. “It seems we all must talk about my father the king.”

“I’d like to know who this is, before we get started.” One of the young men eyed Harasawa. “If what Sakurai hinted at is true, I’d rather know the name of everyone who knows what we’re here for.”

“This, Makoto, is Harasawa Katsunori, who you may thank for the fact that I am still alive.”

Ah, this one Harasawa did remember. Hanamiya, and those who kept company with him, were quite adept at causing trouble within the court. Not bad company though, as he understood it, to the stablehands they entrusted with their horses.

Kiyoshi smiled. “I wondered what sort of man they were charging with all those impossible crimes. It was beginning to sound like you had been kidnapped by the devil.”

Hanamiya snorted, lifting a glass of wine. “Murdered twelve men singlehandedly, set fire to a soldiers’ camp, and carrying the prince over his shoulder the whole time. Lurid stuff.”

Harasawa settled himself in a spot by the wall where he hoped they would soon forget about him.

“There are certainly a few exciting stories I could tell you,” Imayoshi said, settling into a chair, “had we the time.”

Susa sat as well. “Sakurai said the king wants you dead.”

“That seems to be the case.” He had the whole of their attention. Harasawa was invisible in the back of the room.

“Why?” Hanamiya asked sharply. “You’re the only direct heir to the throne.”

“My father is not relying upon reason,” Imayoshi said. “He has become caught up in his own power.”

It was fascinating to watch them talk. Imayoshi never lied about what his father was, he only cut around the truth with the precision of a man shaving—yet even if they did not know what it was Imayoshi wasn’t saying, it was clear each of them expected secrets, kept their own. It was a whirling tide of things being left unsaid, described in vague terms, suggestion, half-truths. It left Harasawa lost and disoriented, understanding little of what was going on, less of what was being said.

What he understood quite clearly was the talk of soldiers.

“So,” Kiyoshi murmured. “We prepare to go to war.”

Not even a moment’s hesitation before they were discussing raising an army, provisions and supplies.

Soft, Harasawa said, “Your Majesty.”

Imayoshi turned, just slightly, to acknowledge that he’d heard, and the others fell silent.

“Your Majesty, may I speak to you alone?”

Imayoshi made a gesture, and the others rose, shepherded by Momoi. “Suzume,” Imayoshi said, “if you would be so kind as to keep listening ears from the door.” There were remarkably few insulted expressions at the implication that they might eavesdrop. Suzume stirred from the chair where she had put herself, quietly watching the conversation, tailing the group out the door, and casting a look back at her brother before she shut it.

“Is there something you wish to say to me, Katsunori?” Imayoshi reached for the bottle of wine that had been opened, pouring himself a glass.

“What good, exactly, will an army do against your father?”

 “It is important that my allies rise up with me—”

“You _saw_ what it was your father did to the empty hall, to the Traitor. The witch who cursed him was not the one who gave him those burns. You, of all people, should know more intimately than anyone how dangerous the king is.”

“Are you questioning my judgement?”

“Yes.” Harasawa did not flinch. “You aren’t someone who makes the same mistakes others have made before you.” He drew in a breath. “I told you, the one thing I want more than anything to avoid is another war.”

“For your children, yes. The ones that you abandoned.”

Harasawa did not remember moving forward to smack the glass from Imayoshi’s hand. It crashed onto the rug, a dark red stain spilling out across the kingdom. Harasawa’s face was inches from Imayoshi’s. “I did what I thought was best for them,” he hissed. “My family lives under the estates of one of your ‘allies.’ Do you think I want to see my son enlisted as a footman, given a weapon he has no training to carry, so that he can be as disposable to you as an ant?”

“Step back, Harasawa,” Imayoshi said. His voice was low, edged.

“I shouldn’t need to tell you what would happen to my wife—to my _daughter._ It doesn’t matter which side of the war they’re on, armies destroy everything in their path. At best, they run the risk of starving in the winter for the sake of feeding your men.”

“I said _step back.”_ Imayoshi stood so abruptly he forced Harasawa back. For a moment Harasawa saw something on his face—something that reminded him too clearly of the way Suzume had snarled when Imayoshi turned his back on her. The fire surged up in the hearth. Imayoshi cast a glance at the stain on the rug and stepped over it. “Do you speak on behalf of every common man, woman, and child, now?”

Harasawa thought of the farmer who had helped them when they fled the inn, when Imayoshi had first brought a healer. “They’d prefer ghosts.”

“What?”

“The farmer’s children, when we first started out on this ‘tour.’ You said it was like we were ghosts.” Harasawa lifted his hand, showing Imayoshi the scar across his palm. “They wanted us gone because they knew exactly what we were. You notice we never once saw that farmer’s wife, but I know she was there. Even widowed, no one with a farm and children stays unmarried long.”

“What is your point, Harasawa?”

“There is nothing about war that will not cause devastation.”

“That does not make it any less necessary.”

Harasawa grabbed hold of Imayoshi’s shoulders, and slammed him into the wall. Imayoshi didn’t look so much frightened or startled as offended and furious. “Are you _listening_ to me? People will die!”

A blast of heat flourished along Imayoshi’s skin and Harasawa recoiled, jerking his hands away, afraid of being burned. Imayoshi stared him down. “People will die, regardless. We can’t all be as selfless as you.”

“Then be selfish,” Harasawa said, “because I won’t survive another war.” He turned away, tugged open the door. Suzume stood nearby, arms folded. She glanced at him as he slammed the door, drawing the attention of the others who were murmuring in a group down the corridor.

Harasawa didn’t know this castle, didn’t know where he was going, but it didn’t matter. He stalked down the corridor away from everyone.

The corridor emptied onto a garden, overhung with willow trees. Unlike the silence in the halls of the castle the garden was no still place—frogs bellowed and insects hummed through the air. Harasawa paused at the edge of the garden, listening.

Stepping into the garden felt almost like a trespass, though there was no barrier, no indication that he shouldn’t enter. A narrow path wound through the trees, not paved with stones, but worn by feet, just wide enough for one person coming or going. Harasawa tread warily, afraid, almost, to disturb the residents of the garden.

He could see a little of the night sky if he craned his neck, stars peeking through the hunched backs of the willows, whose leaves whispered in wind.

There was enough light from the moon to follow the path, and a few steps in, Harasawa could no longer see the passage that had brought him there. He followed the trail back, just to reassure himself it was still there, and he hadn’t been snatched up by some fey trick.

The path led him to a pond, the water unnaturally still and clear, even in the dark. Harasawa could see white stones in the basin of the pond, though he could not have said how deep it was.

The frogs had fallen silent, at his approach. He stood there, then, watching the water, hearing only the insects.

“That is the pool in which I see.”

Harasawa tensed, turning with his hand on his sword. Momoi smiled, stepping from the path. He had not heard her coming, did not hear her footsteps now, though there were plenty of twigs that had snapped under his boots when he walked. It was a wilder garden than he expected from a lady of her rank. “My Lady. I am sorry if I intruded.”

“I’m impressed, actually.” She walked along the edge of the pond, and Harasawa did not follow. “My garden admits few visitors. Even Shouichi had a hard time gaining its trust.”

Harasawa did not understand, and he expected that he didn’t want to. “His Majesty must be discussing his plans with the others, now.”

“And you are wondering why I am not with them.” She paused, bending to reach into the water, scooping up a white stone. She stroked it almost like a pet—it wasn’t until it croaked that Harasawa realized that the stones were the frogs he had heard. White as the moon.

“I’d almost guess, My Lady, that you already know what the prince will decide.”

Momoi carried the frog in her hand, continuing her circuit of the pond. “Not from any vision, if that is what you mean. Shouichi and I have known each other quite some time… in fact, we are betrothed, but he did not tell you that, did he?” She smiled.

Harasawa had wondered. Imayoshi was the sole heir.

Sole heirs made people nervous.

“He did not, My Lady. But it does not surprise me.”

“Hmm.” She returned the frog to the water, where it swam away and settled on the bottom, seeming again to be still as a stone. “No doubt he believed it would complicate things between you. You seem a rather straightforward sort… which makes it all the more surprising to me that you are not totally obedient to him. Though I suppose if you were, Shouichi would have tired of you some time ago.” She stood directly across the pond from him now, her long hair sheeting down her back, her mouth curved in that amused smile.

“Have you used your sight on me, My Lady?”

“Not so much as you might think. Your proximity to Shouichi clouds my vision, it is much easier to look back.” She looked at him, Harasawa could swear he saw the moonlight strike her eyes from across the water. “I could show you your children, if you wished.”

A raw feeling tugged at the back of Harasawa’s throat. Guilt, he thought. Perhaps a little fear. “No, thank you, My Lady.”

She shrugged. “I don’t require water to know what it is you wish to ask me. You wish to know what course Shouichi will choose, what will come of it.”

“I take it that you will not tell me.”

“I couldn’t if I wished to.” She was rounding the pond, coming back to where he stood. “What Shouichi, and Suzume, and His Majesty the King are, lie beyond my sight. Where the future concerns them, I only see smoke.” She showed her palms, giving him an ‘ah, well,’ smile. “There is something I can tell you, though.”

He looked at her, wary. “I am afraid to ask, My Lady.”

She almost grinned. “A wise man. Most who know what I can do want nothing but a parsing of the future.” She brushed a willow branch out of the way, stepped over a root. “But what I have to tell you concerns the past.”

“That’s not much comfort, My Lady.”

“Perhaps not.” She nodded at him. “It concerns the battle which nearly killed you.”

Harasawa looked away from her. “Does it?”

“He saved your life.”

Harasawa turned, staring at her. “Pardon?”

“You can’t be expected to remember everything clearly.” She was trying to be kind. “A battle like that, no one could be expected to be sure of what happened.” The trees quivered in the wind, the water rippled, went dark, and stilled.

“You meant to protect him,” Momoi said. “It made you reckless. You were injured. And he killed the man who harmed you.”

Harasawa’s voice sounded like a stranger’s. “I watched him die.”

“So you did. Such is war, I don’t need to tell you that.” She clasped her hands. “But he urged you to live. He did not want you to die. He cared for you. You were the only squire he ever had.”

She could have been lying to him, Harasawa wouldn’t have known the difference. She knew too much that was true for him to be able to dismiss what she said. He let out a breath, stared across the water. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because young men are reckless where the people they care about are concerned, even Shouichi.” The pond rippled once more, and went clear. The frogs were nowhere to be seen—in their place swam a school of white fish, swirling about the pond with the movement of the breeze.

“I have already told the prince that I am ready to die for him.”

“That is not what I mean.” Her eyes caught the moonlight again, in that strange way. “A thousand men are willing to die for Shouichi; that is not what makes you valuable. The best way you can protect Shouichi is by staying alive. The way you wish your knight had done for you.”

Before Harasawa could say anything else she looked to the path. “It is nearly dawn, now. Best you get inside, out of sight. My servants are loyal, but the fewer people who know you and Shouichi and Suzume are here, the better.” She gestured to him to follow her. “I have had everything prepared. You will be comfortable, while you’re here.”

Was it so near dawn? Harasawa looked up, between the trees, where a thin grey light was filling the sky. Dawn shouldn't have come so quickly—it had been the dead of night when he stepped into the garden, it shouldn't have been so long. Perhaps it was a fey trick, after all. It made as much sense as anything else. How many secrets were there in the old families?

Momoi led him back down the path, never looking back to see if he followed, but he supposed he made enough noise that she didn't have to.

Harasawa’s head spun and he felt the long night catching up to him, settling on his shoulders like a heavy weight. He rubbed his face and stifled a yawn, following her through the corridors, the first whispers of activity rising in the halls. It seemed a world apart from the king’s hall, which never fell silent, which was never totally dark. If Momoi stood to be queen, he wondered what would become of her hall.

She brought him to a smooth pale door, unremarkable except for that it seemed to lack a handle. “It will only open for those I tell it to,” she said, “no one will disturb you.”

He thanked her, pressing a hand to the door. It opened without a sound, admitting him to a room lit with the same flameless lanterns that seemed to be everywhere in the castle. A wide bath occupied the space by one wall, where Imayoshi was sitting, brooding. He glanced up at Harasawa, shifting. “Where were you?”

“The garden.”

“Learn anything interesting?”

Harasawa didn’t answer, spotting the bed. He sagged onto the end, pulling off boots, off shirt.

“Katchan.” His voice was soft, almost coaxing. “Come here.”

Harasawa did not want to get up, did not want to admit the power that voice had over him, and did not want to give Imayoshi the satisfaction. He rubbed the back of his neck, looking anywhere but at him. “Have you and the others decided on a plan?”

Imayoshi stirred. “Not yet. There is more to be discussed.”

“Where’s your sister?”

“With Momoi.”

For a moment silence fell between them. Harasawa knew well enough that assaulting a member of the royal family could well enough earn him a beheading.

He did not have it in him to apologize.

“Katchan, at least enjoy the bath. I can’t say when we’ll next be able to enjoy a luxury.”

He rose, undressing, and stepped into the bath. Imayoshi shifted over, brushing Harasawa’s hair away, moving as if to kiss him. Harasawa pulled away. “I didn’t know you were betrothed.”

Imayoshi paused. “Does that change something?”

“I know nothing about you.”

“Nonsense.”

“Is it? The people in that room—I’ve heard their names, but not from you.” He reached for the rag draped over the edge of the bath, determined to soon be clean, dry, and in bed. “You, meanwhile, remind me of my how I failed before you were even riding a horse.”

Imayoshi was quiet while Harasawa washed. He caught Harasawa’s wrist when he went to stand. “Katchan,”

“Your Majesty, I am very tired, what is it?”  

“When I’m crowned, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” Imayoshi’s grip tightened. “You’re still with me, aren’t you?”

Harasawa ached, in more ways than one. “To hell and back, wasn’t that what I said?”

That brought something like a smile to Imayoshi’s face. “You said you’d walk through it for me, I think.”

“I’m not sure of the difference anymore.” He pressed a kiss to Imayoshi’s cheek, and climbed from the bath. He was glad the room was warm as he toweled off with the linen provided, and made for the bed. If the bed was soft or not Harasawa didn’t know the difference, he was out the moment he closed his eyes.

He was alone when he woke, with no idea how long he’d slept or what time of day it was, if it even was day. He was powerfully hungry, though, and found waiting for him a plate of food, still hot. He ate, washed his face, dressed, and wondered what else he should do.

Momoi had wanted them ‘out of sight,’ so he supposed it was better not to leave the room, being that he didn’t know the castle well… but he remembered the garden, and wondered how it looked in the daylight.

He slowly opened the door, and found the hall quiet. He guessed from the light it was afternoon, and let the door fall shut behind him.

It was easy enough to retrace the steps he had taken before, keeping his head down when anyone passed him, not drawing attention to himself. He couldn’t be sure if it was his efforts, or some secret of Momoi’s that kept him from being noticed. He found again the corridor that had led to the garden, followed it the way he remembered, tracing his fingers across the cool stone.

He came on a closed stone wall.

Harasawa doubled back the other way, thinking he’d gone to the wrong end, but there he found a stairwell, and going back the way he had come he again found only a stone wall.

“Don’t be offended. The garden keeps its own time.”

Harasawa jumped again. “My Lady—I didn’t hear you.”

Momoi smiled. “Shouichi will be glad to hear that you’re awake. We’re gathering once more, to discuss. He would like you to be there.”

That surprised Harasawa. He only nodded, though, and followed the lady. They passed servants who gave their courtesies to Momoi, and seemed not to notice Harasawa at all. He made no effort to seek their acknowledgment.

Momoi’s entrance to the room in which the rest were gathered was received warmly, and only Imayoshi paid any mind to Harasawa. “How did you sleep?” he asked.

“It must have been well. I don’t remember it.” Harasawa noticed the rug, the wine stain still very present. “I’ve ruined it, I suppose.”

“Don’t mind it. Rugs may be replaced.” He nodded at the chairs. “Make yourself comfortable. It promises to be a long night.”

“Not without wine, I hope.”

Imayoshi smiled. “Only a little. I do prefer you with a clear head.”

“You’d be the first.” He found himself a place to sit. The other milled around for a bit muttering, telling something to Momoi. Suzume’s eyes burned, her hands clenching and unclenching, her jaw tight. Imayoshi glanced at them.

“Is there something you’d all like to share with me?”

Momoi came to stand next to Imayoshi. “A messenger came from the royal city. It seems,” she said, measuring her words carefully, “that a great black dragon has taken the king’s castle—trapping the king inside.”

#

They took dinner in private that night, Harasawa, Suzume, Momoi, and Imayoshi. Imayoshi was agitated, and that worried Harasawa more than anything else. “If he’s changed, and allowed people to see it—”

“So far as we know, no one knows it’s Father,” Suzume said.

“That’s not the point. He must know that we’re close, he’s waiting for us.” Imayoshi seemed to be more intent on mutilating his food than eating it. Harasawa had to still his hand to keep from reaching for the wine.

“What are you going to do?”

Imayoshi looked at him, coming to focus. “I’m going to do what I said I was going to do. I’m going to kill him.”

“How.”

Imayoshi looked at Suzume. What passed between them in the silence, Harasawa could guess. “We’ll go on ahead,” Imayoshi said slowly. “With our soldiers assembling under Susa that will distract Father, at least for a little while. Susa’s hall and ranks are strong, he can defend the place, if he must.”

“I will go with Susa,” Momoi said, “my place can manage itself, until I return. My sight will be limited, but I will be better able to help if I am there.”

Imayoshi nodded, and looked to Harasawa. “We’ll get into the city, into the castle as far as we can before anyone notices we’re there. We need whatever advantage we can take.”

Harasawa kept his gaze. “What am I meant to do?”

“Get us in there,” Imayoshi said, “and then get out.”

#

They stayed the one more night in Momoi’s hall, Imayoshi buried himself in strategizing with the others, to which Harasawa had little to contribute. He drank what he was allowed—for Imayoshi still had half an eye on the bottles of wine, and hung around the back of the room, keeping out of the way.

Suzume leaned against the wall, eyes closed as if she was dozing, but Harasawa was certain she was listening.

“Do you think he’ll be able to change?”

She opened her eyes a moment, looking at Harasawa. “At this rate? It would take a miracle.”

“It would be better if he waited, wouldn’t it?”

“Of course it would. He knows that.”

“So why isn’t he?”

“Because of them.” Suzume nodded towards the others. “They like him, they know him, and they are loyal to him—but that loyalty is not set in stone. All of them have ambitions, just like Shouichi does. It’s why they get along so well. He earned their loyalty, and he has to keep it. So he must act now, or risk losing everything.”

“If this fails he could still lose everything.”

“Yes.” She closed her eyes once more, leaning her head back against the wall. “He could.”

#

They left by the same means they had arrived, tucked into the hollow of Momoi’s ferry, lanterns dark, creeping down the river past the soldiers’ camps. As they prepared to leave a cold look crossed Momoi’s face. “I resent having to sneak about like a thief in my own lands,” she said. “The day they’re gone cannot come too soon.”

“You’ll command them, soon enough,” Imayoshi said, giving her that easy smile. She returned it, but neither was at ease.

“I won’t tell you to stay safe,” she murmured. “But make sure I see you again.”

Shouichi nodded, touching her arm. Harasawa looked away, feeling he was intruding.

The horses would remain in Momoi’s stables. They planned to reach the castle by other, swifter means.

Stepping from the ferry, Harasawa extended his hand to help Imayoshi across, and turned back for Suzume, but she leapt from the ferry and bounded from the rocks, landing lightly on her feet. Momoi laughed. “I’ll be waiting for news of you,” she said, “let it be good.”

The lanterns on her ferry went dark, and after a moment, it may well have not been there at all.

Harasawa let out a breath, and turned to Imayoshi and Suzume. He would never get used to seeing a dragon in place of the person. Suzume’s claws scraped the ground, and she nudged Imayoshi toward her back, glancing at Harasawa.

“I’m still uncomfortable with this,” Harasawa said. Suzume growled.

“Just get over here, Katchan. You’re not going to fall off.”

“I assure you that’s not what I’m having difficulty with.” He put a hesitant hand to her scales, and Imayoshi held a hand down to pull him up.

“Hold onto me,” Imayoshi said.

“Never make me do this again.” Harasawa flinched at the upsweep of Suzume’s wings. She leapt into the air and the wind rushed past his ears. Harasawa decided very quickly he did not care for this, that his general feeling about it had been correct, and that he would be lucky if his heart didn’t give out before they reached the king.

It was quieter, above the trees. Imayoshi shifted forward, head bent into the wind. Near impossible to see in the dark, forests and rivers and farmland swept past beneath them.

Five nights like this, before they were within reach of the city. Long enough for the activity of Imayoshi’s allies to draw the attention of the king, so that they might pass unnoticed.

“Shouichi,”

“Yeah?”

“What exactly is Momoi?”

Shouichi laughed. “Now, Katchan, I thought you wanted to know more about _me.”_

Harasawa smiled. “Right. Of course. I’ll be sure to ask the lady if she’s entirely human when I’m calling her my queen.”

“That’d amuse her.” Shouichi touched a hand over Harasawa’s.

“Do you know what she is?”

“Of course I do.” Shouichi looked over his shoulder at Harasawa. “You’d be surprised at how much I know about everyone.”

_And how little they know about you,_ Harasawa thought. He looked out over the forest, his cheek against the back of Imayoshi’s head.

He’d sworn an oath, once. Loyalty to the throne, protection of the king. That’s what he’d vowed to give when he was knighted. It had seemed an easy enough honor to uphold, at the time. Less so, now.

He would protect Shouichi.

Even against the king.


	12. Fire and Ash

The road outside the city, when morning dawned upon it, was deathly silent. They hadn’t bothered with any inns—too many people—and Harasawa doubted that anyone headed towardthe city would be greeted without suspicion. They had walked most of the night, guided by Suzume’s clear sight, and slept a little hidden in a copse of trees, though it was by no means a restful night for any of them.

Harasawa shouldered their pack—their excuse for having little to their name, were there anyone to ask, would be that they had been set upon by highwaymen who had taken their horses and left them with nothing more than clothes and a little food.  It would be an entirely unsatisfactory explanation to anyone who noted that Harasawa still possessed his sword.

He woke Imayoshi, for Suzume was already awake, tying her skirt so that she could climb barefoot up the fir tree they had camped under, and there get a better view of the road.

Imayoshi ate a little while she climbed, neither of them saying anything, their minds on the castle. This was what he had hated about war, too.

The waiting.

Suzume slid back down the tree rather more quickly than necessary, jumping from the lowest branch to land in a crouch. She dusted off her skirts and shook them out, glancing up. “There are camps, but not soldiers. Small ones. I think they’re people from the city who didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

They’d be at the city by noon, if they walked quickly.

“Could you see the city?” Harasawa asked.

Suzume nodded. “Not well, but there isn’t much going on there. Probably everyone’s hiding.”

“We’ll ask them if the dragon has stirred from the castle since it came,” Imayoshi said. “We need to know how active he’s been.”

“You could just fly on the city,” Harasawa said.

“Shouichi thinks he can still be reasoned with,” Suzume said, the scorn evident in her voice.

“If I can avoid having to explain to the city why I associate with dragons, that would be helpful,” Imayoshi snapped. “We’ve managed to keep this secret for generations.”

“And Father is about to let it all be discovered, I don’t see what we gain by playing this game.”

“The less time he has to realize that you’re back and very much alive the better,” Imayoshi said. “Besides, if either of us attempts to change out here he will know. Better to creep up on him, and not give him the chance to prepare.”

#

“You’re going to the city? Are you mad? Haven’t you heard about the dragon?” The man in the camp looked them up and down, and Harasawa knew what he saw. An old knight, and two young people barely out of their swaddling clothes.

“That’s why we’re going.” Imayoshi was looking down the road when he spoke. “Haven’t you heard? The prince is raising an army.”

“Is he? Well, all the better for him, I’ll let him face the dragon. Me, I’ll stay here.”

“Has the dragon left the castle since it came?” Suzume was growing irritated. “Flown out for any reason.”

“Aye, I’ve seen it over the city. Never leaves the walls, though.”

“What’s he eating if he’s not leaving the city?” Harasawa said in a low voice. The man heard him.

“I’d heard the servants in the castle were all dead,” he said. “And the horses in the stables.”

“Well, that’ll have the good sir going after the serpent for sure,” Imayoshi said, as if they were jesting. “He has a soft spot for horses.”

Harasawa glanced away.

“You’re all mad,” the man said. “But go if you must, ah, I can’t stop you. I’ll pray for your souls.”

“I appreciate it,” Imayoshi said, nodding. “Pray for our mother, while you’re at it.”

“How much of that do you suppose is true?” Harasawa asked as they left.

“What servant would stay long enough to be eaten?” Suzume asked. “A particularly stupid knight, maybe, but not the servants. Not after the first hour.”  

No one said anything about the horses.

A sad little marching party they made, striding down that road. Harasawa found himself thinking of when he had first ridden out to war, his daughter not yet born, nor even knowing at the time that his wife was pregnant. He thought of the girl he’d met in that village, selling apples, with that cheerful smile. His son had not yet been walking when he left, but his daughter… he remembered her better. Full of spirit, always moving. He thought of her as a troublemaker, when he imagined her growing up. Running underfoot, bringing home whatever small animal it was she’d managed to catch.

A few years now, he thought, and she’d be married.

“You’re being awfully quiet, Katchan.”

“Thinking.”

“So I guessed. About our plan?”

“Not exactly.” Harasawa shifted the weight of the pack, sighing. “After this.”

“Oh?”

Suzume walked some distance ahead of them, though not so far that Harasawa imagined she couldn’t hear them. “I think I’d like to go home,” he said, soft. “I’d like to meet my children.”

He had never seen the city so empty, so quiet. There were people, but they hid, kept indoors. The city walls were unguarded, damaged. Rubble filled the streets, over which they had to step, keeping to the shadows as best they could. It had begun to rain, and the stones were slick.

The chill caught up to Harasawa, his hands growing stiff. Suzume and Imayoshi seemed as flush and warm as ever, unbothered by the rain which soaked into their clothes and hair. Harasawa clenched and unclenched his hands, willing blood back into his fingers. If nothing else, he would not die unable to hold a sword.

Suzume climbed the rubble of a house that had been destroyed, raising her face. She closed her eyes, and Harasawa could not tell if she was listening, or trying to pick up a scent on the air. She slid back down, gesturing them to follow, and jogged up the hill.

They ducked inside the castle gates with no one even looking at them twice. A dog fed on the corpse of a sheep, and growled when it saw them. They gave the dog a wide berth, stepping out of the rain, listening to the wind murmur through the empty castle. None of the crowds that Harasawa had seen on Imayoshi’s name day, none of the usual activity of people coming and going, the king’s hunting hounds or the cattle and sheep which were usually kept.

Fear curled at the edges of his mind.

“This way,” Imayoshi said, turning toward the throne room. “Harasawa, you should go, now.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“That wasn’t a request, Katchan.”

“I know.” Harasawa nodded his head. “But with all due respect, Your Majesty—it is my duty to stand by your side.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Suzume hissed. “He’ll hear—”

There was a stirring from somewhere within the castle, the sound of a heavy body moving over stone, a rumble through stone. Harasawa reached for his sword, and stepped in front of Imayoshi. He had not come all this way, not been through all he had been through, so that he could abandon Imayoshi now.

He knew the shape of a dragon, now, the sleek head on the serpentine neck, eyes shining as it emerged from the shadows, four times the size of Suzume when she took on her other form.

The dragon’s head loomed higher as he looked down at them, taking them in. The wind took on a sound like laughter.

“My, my,” the dragon murmured through the wind. “Two chicks returned to the nest.” He turned an eye on Harasawa, the way a viper coiled in preparation to strike. “And an old warhorse.”

Harasawa unsheathed his sword, and the dragon snorted, laughing. “Do you think yourself a dragonslayer?” Smoke curled from his teeth. “Even twenty years ago I would not have said you were that bold.”

“Not a dragonslayer,” Harasawa said, “but a kingslayer, maybe.”

The dragon’s crest flared, and he growled. “It pains me,” he said, “to kill a man who once saved my life—but I have no mercy for traitors.” The smoke vanished as he drew in breath, that red glow of fire beginning in the back of the dragon’s throat.

Harasawa grimaced, preparing to run forward to meet him. All they needed, he thought, was a moment for the king to be distracted—all he had to give them was a moment.

A black clawed arm slammed Harasawa to the side, a smaller dragon meeting the king face to face, crest raised, roaring so that stone shook. Harasawa clutched his arms over his ears. Suzume, he thought, looking at the dragon, but as he looked back to where they had been standing she was there, only just beginning to shift.

Harasawa looked back. The dragons were almost indistinguishable except for size, Imayoshi snarling, his father answering in kind.

_Get us in, and then get out._ Harasawa scrambled to his feet as Suzume joined the fight, slamming into the king’s side, talons raking over scales, stone crumbling. If he stayed he would be crushed.

But he couldn’t leave them.

The king threw Suzume off, turned back to Imayoshi, fire roaring out of his teeth. Imayoshi threw his weight forward, claws raised to swipe at the king’s face. The king ducked his head down and shoved Imayoshi back, knocking him into the stone wall. Suzume caught teeth around the king’s hind leg, jerking his weight out from under him.

The columns around him began to crack and grate, sliding. Harasawa sheathed his sword and ran back into the open square, the wall behind him collapsing. A billowing cloud of grit and dust blinded him, and he frantically scrubbed at his eyes, blinking as another roar shook the castle.

The king had regained his footing, and slammed Imayoshi to the ground, catching the back of his neck in his jaws. It was a bite capable of killing.

Fire. Suzume had reared back on her haunches, breathed fire into the king’s face to make him release his hold on Imayoshi. Blood poured down Imayoshi’s back.

It was like a battle that Harasawa had seen a thousand times before—the old bull elk against the new—and yet entirely different. Brutal and animal, and yet with all the calculation of a kingdom at stake. It wasn’t simply a matter of territory or power. Shouichi and Suzume stood to either gain or lose their lives.

And to do it they had to kill their father.

The king spread wings, though there was hardly room to do so. He bounded from rubble to castle wall, and leapt into the gray sky. Imayoshi and Suzume followed, lighter, faster. Harasawa ran up the steps of the castle wall two at a time. He would not lose sight of them.

The king’s mistake had been in thinking he could outpace his children. Like crows to the hawk they descended on him, raking wings and back with their talons, until one—Harasawa could not tell which—began to force him back to the castle. They were defter in the air than he would have thought, their sheer size not preventing them from moving as fluidly as snakes, never once looking in danger of falling as they harried the king, tearing scales from flesh, drawing blood. They forced him back, away from the city, away from the people who remained hidden below.

Harasawa ducked as they passed overhead, smashing through a tower—Imayoshi fell on the king from above, driving him down. They fell somewhere over the throne room, weight caving in the stone that had stood for centuries, and Suzume spiraled in after them, disappearing into the newly made cavern. He heard the snarls and roars, and the sounds of fighting.

All too abruptly, everything went silent.

Harasawa stood for a while on the wall, listening to the wind and the rain. He made his way too quickly down the steps, nearly slipping, falling. He caught hold of the stair above him and when he was certain he was safe, he couldn’t help but laugh. To think—three dragons, and the thing that nearly killed him was falling from the stairs. Cruel. Fucking cruel.

He ran when he hit flat ground, breathless when he reached the doors of the throne room. Solid oak, they’d once been, now broken and splintered like kindling. He pulled himself through, conscious of the splintered wood tearing his clothes and drawing blood.

The body of a great, black dragon lay twisted on the dais that had once held the throne. A smaller one had torn open its chest, and was feeding on the beast’s heart. Harasawa remembered with a chill the way Suzume had spoken, sitting that night by the fire. _I mean to eat his heart._

Sitting on the steps, almost unnoticeable, was Imayoshi.

Perhaps he only thought Imayoshi’s name, perhaps he gasped it. Shouichi looked up, saw him, and stood. He was bleeding, his face gone almost gray. He stumbled toward Harasawa—Harasawa ran to him, catching him just as he lost his balance and fell.

Imayoshi crumpled into his arms, face pressed into his shoulder. Harasawa could not tell which of them was shaking more. He sat on the steps, holding Imayoshi. He became aware that Imayoshi was sobbing. He stroked Imayoshi’s hair, fingers sticky with blood, murmuring things that were half nonsense. The only thing he remembered saying quite clearly was, “I’m here. I’m here.” There were tears on his face. “I’m not going anywhere.”

#

It was a long, cold night. No one came looking for them, perhaps more out of fear than anything else. Harasawa tended to their injuries, found water for them to wash the blood from their hands and faces. Both were exhausted, battered. Imayoshi had taken the brunt of the injuries, his back ripped open in at least a dozen places, which Suzume carefully closed the worst of.

The death of her father did not bother her nearly as much as it troubled Imayoshi. Harasawa thought he understood, now, why she had been so concerned about her brother’s hunting. She did not disguise her otherness half as well as he did.

Watching her, it was much harder to forget that she was not human, that it was only a shape she wore. Perhaps that was why it had been so much easier for her to shed that shape—she was more dragon than her brother was.

Harasawa found a room that was still intact where they could stay, out of the rain. He sat himself up against the wall, and Imayoshi lay against his chest, Harasawa’s cloak pulled around both of them. Suzume stayed up for quite some time, tending a little fire, and dozing. Harasawa slept a little, chin tucked into Imayoshi’s hair, not willing to let him go.

He woke in the dark, aware that Imayoshi had shifted, and even if he could not quite see it, was looking at him. “Your Majesty,” he murmured.

“Am I still alive, then?”

“Yes.” Harasawa shifted, finding Imayoshi’s arm in the dark, running his hand up to the shoulder. “Yes, you are.”

“Good.” Imayoshi touched his forehead to Harasawa’s. “Good.” He let out a breath, trembling a little. “I thought everything hurt too much for me to be dead.”

“You’re king, now.”

Imayoshi was quiet for a moment, breath passing between them. “I don’t care,” he murmured. “I don’t care.”

It wasn’t true, neither of them believed it was true. There was relief in Imayoshi’s voice, and maybe a bit of regret. He settled back into Harasawa’s arms, head on his shoulder. “You put yourself between three dragons.”

“I did.”

“You’re an idiot.”

Harasawa laughed, shaking as he tried to stifle it, so as not to wake Suzume. “You wouldn’t be the first to call me that.” He held Imayoshi close. “You changed.”

“I did.” Imayoshi’s cheek was warm against his shoulder. “It surprised me as much as it surprised you. But I suppose I needed a miracle like that to save you from getting yourself killed.”

“I love you.”

The silence that followed made Harasawa’s heart falter, but after a moment he felt the soft brush of Imayoshi’s lips over his skin. “I love you, too.” He adjusted the way he was sat, pulled Harasawa’s cloak tighter, and settled in. “We’ll find messengers in the morning.”

#

The story that became known, as Shouichi’s messengers spread across the kingdom, was that the late king had become involved in some perverse magic that would grant him immortality through the death of his children, and that through it he had summoned to his control a dragon—one that had eventually killed him. The smaller dragons, it was believed, were either broodmates of the first, or had never existed at all. Some said they were conjured by the king, and had flown away in the night after his death, freed from their bonds.

Harasawa thought it sounded all rather unbelievable, but the story spread, and songs were already being written about it, and there was little he could do but shrug his shoulders and go on with things.

Most annoyingly, the death of the dragon was attributed to him, though Imayoshi pled ignorance when questioned about it. People had hardly begun to return to the castle but there were a dozen boys vying for his attention, eager to be his squire, all of whom he foisted off on other knights. “I had one squire, and that was quite enough.”

Momoi and Susa were the first who arrived to offer tribute to the new king. They came in a flurry of banners under the first snow, wrapped in fur-lined cloaks and looking half out of a dream.

Momoi brought with her two horses, one black, and one spotted gray. She stepped from the saddle of her own horse, greeting Harasawa with a kiss on the cheek, as if they were old friends. “You did well.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he nodded to the horses. “Thank you, My Lady, for taking care of them.”

“They were quite spoiled.” She smiled. “Where is Shouichi?”

“The king is with his mother, I believe, receiving a sharp rebuke.” Her Majesty had arrived hardly more than an hour or so before Momoi, a perfect storm cloud of fury and concealed pride.

“Ah, best not to interrupt her, I think.” Momoi took Susa by the arm, making their way to the great hall where fires were burning and wine being poured, and Harasawa took the horses to the stables. Ranger nibbled at the back of his shirt, and Tyrant only tried to bite him once. He made them comfortable, and found his way back to the hall. Momoi was chatting amiably with Suzume, who had already escaped her mother’s admonitions, though Harasawa doubted she had seen the last of it.

“Dare I ask when they arrived?” Imayoshi had appeared at his shoulder.

“Just a short while ago,” Harasawa said.

“Ah, good, I haven’t kept them waiting then.” Imayoshi touched his arm. “In the spring, I was thinking we could on tour. A real tour, this time.” He smiled. “Suzume will be my steward, so that will leave us to travel as we wish.”

“A real tour, with more people and a proper guard, I assume,” Harasawa said, smiling a little.

“Well, I’ll hardly be able to leave my new wife behind,” Imayoshi answered, and gave a sly smile. “But I rather think the two of you will get along.”

“I rather think she frightens me a bit.”

“As she should.” Imayoshi pressed a kiss to his cheek. “We’ll plan later.” He paused, a hand on Harasawa’s shoulder. “Presuming, of course, you aren’t going to try and put yourself between me and anymore dragons.”

“I could hardly leave my new king behind.” That made Imayoshi smile, and he left to speak to Momoi and Susa. Harasawa watched from a distance, watching the milling about of Imayoshi’s guards, who all treated Harasawa with a deference he found to be discomfiting. He seemed to have found himself in an odd dream, which he kept expecting to wake from, and be invisible once more.

Stories had begun to circulate of their ‘adventure,’ if it could be called that. It seemed, still, that Harasawa had defeated quite a few more men than he ever remembered drawing his sword against, and that he—quite alone—had saved the prince from the witch-cursed monster that had haunted an isolated village. No wonder the young squires looked at him with far more awe than he deserved.

A spring tour would be good for them. It would solidify Imayoshi’s place as king.

And it would take them near the village where his children lived.

Imayoshi’s mother stepped out from the corridor, dressed in new finery, looking as regal as he remembered. “I did not expect to see you alive again.”

Harasawa bowed. “Your Majesty.”

“There is no need for that.” She looked across the room to Momoi. “She’ll be queen, soon enough. I arranged their marriage myself—I’m glad they became so fond of each other.”

“They’re well suited for each other, I think,” Harasawa murmured. “They have a similar temperament.”

“Which of them killed him, really?” Her voice was soft. “It doesn’t matter, I suppose, but I know it was not you. You wouldn’t have survived.”

“I couldn’t say, Your Majesty,” Harasawa said. “They were out of my sight when he was killed, and neither has spoken of it since.”

“That is to be expected.” Her expression was grim. “They are reticent by nature.” She sighed, smoothing an imagined wrinkle in her sleeve. “Thank you, for keeping them safe.”

Harasawa bowed his head. “I would do it all again, Your Majesty.”


End file.
